Greyt Big Talk w/ Dennis & Kathy Barrie

Dennis Barrie is an internationally recognized museum director, cultural historian and expert in popular culture who has built museums on, perhaps, unexpected subjects: rock and roll, spying and the Mob.

He began his career in the art world as Midwest Director of the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art, then directed Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center from 1983 to 1992. In 1990 he and the center were indicted on obscenity charges over Robert Mapplethorpe's exhibition The Perfect Moment. A Cincinnati jury acquitted both, in what is considered the first criminal trial of an art museum over the contents of an exhibition.

He went on to become co-creator and founding executive director of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland. With Kathy Barrie and their firm, Barrie Projects, he led the development of the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC, and The Mob Museum: National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement in Las Vegas, along with numerous exhibits and museums around the country, and took on the first comprehensive Olympic and Paralympic museum in the US, in Colorado Springs.

Kathy Barrie has spent her career where museums, public art and civic life meet. She began in education and exhibits at the Cleveland Museum of Art, then became the founding executive director of Cleveland Public Art, the city's public art and civic discourse organization, now LAND Studio.

With Dennis Barrie, founding executive director of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, she leads Barrie Projects, which plans museums and cultural projects on unexpected subjects. She led content development, curatorial direction and design for the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage and The Mob Museum in Las Vegas, and Barrie Projects worked on the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Museum in Colorado Springs from its 2013 feasibility study to its opening in 2020. In Cleveland the firm produced the Catalog of Ideas: A Vision for Uptown. Kathy also heads Case Western Reserve University's Putnam Art Collection, and in 2024 she gave the university's Richard N. Campen Lecture in Architecture and Sculpture.