2006 - The Nimoys Q&A

Actor and director Leonard Nimoy is venturing where seemingly few seek to go: Arts funding. With his wife, Susan Bay-Nimoy, he is distributing 425,000 this year to 21 U.S. art organizations, the money alotted through the Nimoy Foundation.

About the Waxner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University Leonard Nimoy says: "This is unlike anything we have in L.A." Susan Bay-Nimoy serves as vice chairwoman of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

On May, 23 2006 both discussed their artistic interests:

Q: Leonard, you've been involved in photography for decades. Why?

Leonard Nimoy: I've been addicted to black-and-white photography since I was 13 years old. In photography, I can do something that an actor can't do. An actor can't make an object...

Q: Who got whom focused on contemporary art?

Leonard Nimoy: I think Susan is the intense collector.

Susan Bay-Nimoy: We only buy work we both want. We took trips with the museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. What we were learning was opening up our minds to the world, to another way of seeing and knowing. It was very nourishing.

Leonard Nimoy: That's the word - nourishing. We live with the great energy that comes off of the work in our home.

Q: You draw energy off the art?

Susan Bay-Nimoy: We have sort of a mantra: ... If the work no longer informs you, no longer has mystery, when we feel you've got it, it's time to give it away. What makes contemporary art so vital is that it is about ideas and materials, and it does not stand alone... All postmodernist art engages you in different ways. The best of it is asking you to think and re-experience, and that's energy.

Q: ...Do you think the nation has too many artists?

Leonard Nimoy: What would worry me is if that number of politicians were being graduated. I'd be very upset. Thousands of artists is a very good thing.

Susan Bay-Nimoy: We take the position that art is not a luxury. Art making is not frivolous. It is critical to sustain one's soul. It's essential to our lives. It informs us about ourselves in ways that words alone can't.

Q: How do you tackle the challenge of contemporary art?

Leonard Nimoy: We don't always understand what we are looking at. Sometimes it's helpful to meet the artist; sometimes it's helpful for a curator to give us some insight into what the artist is dealing with... literature on the subject.

Susan Bay-Nimoy: Or decent tours.

Leonard Nimoy: What you are really leading to is the exploration of your mind and ideas based on art that perhaps you don't particularly understand when you first see it. And to go rather than run away from it is where the excitement is - to explore it, ask questions about it, research it, talk to people about it...

Asked for names of artists which appeal to them Leonard mentions Ivan Morley and Liza Lou.