Spotlight on Grant Samuelsen

11 Questions with board member Grant

I’m a Realtor in Madison with Witkins Realty/ReMax Preferred. Before moving to real estate, I spent 25 years working in the worlds of visual art, music, and higher education. I have a BFA from UW-Madison in painting and printmaking and a Master’s in Public Administration from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. I developed a serious interest in architecture, design and preservation at a very early age while growing up in the northern suburbs of Chicago, surrounded by major designs by Wright and other modernists. Madison’s built environment and the social, cultural and economic histories behind it are endless sources of fascination for me. In my work, I do everything I can to educate my clients about the community. We’ve lived in five cities, but Madison has always been home. Our family is now permanently situated on Madison’s near east side, where we share a 1924 Craftsman with far too many records, books, musical instruments, mid-century furniture pieces and a Pitbull mix named Dez.

1.    What three traits define you? 

Ethical, creative, and deliberate.

2.    What is your personal philosophy?  

Stay curious, be highly suspicious of fixed categories, remember that comedy is everything, and always assume the best in everyone, unless or until they blow it.

3.    What are you listening to/reading these days?

It’s a long list. Much of what I do that doesn’t involve my work or my family has something to do with music - playing it, listening to it, collecting it, and reading about it. Currently I’m dangerously obsessed with a Hungarton Records box set from 1967 of Bartók’s String Quartets, by the Tátrai Quartet, which is so unlike other performances of these works that it verges on being a new form of music. I’m also listening to a single-LP compilation of the entire recorded output of the Madison No Wave band Xerobot, Eric Dolphy’s Out There, and an impossibly obscure record of Barry Gray’s music for the Gerry Anderson TV series, UFO.

I’m currently reading books on the British Post-Punk band Gang of Four and this crazy thing called Nina Simone’s Gum, by Nick Cave collaborator Warren Ellis. I don’t read a lot of fiction, but lately Otessa Mosfegh’s Homesick for Another World has been nearby. For the past few months I’ve also kept close at hand a really neat collection of essays called Midwest Architecture Journeys, which I would recommend to anyone interested in the work of The Trust.

4.    What is the greatest challenge you have had to overcome in your life thus far?

Parenthood, and, relatedly, constantly having to push back against the fact that I really, really, really don’t want to grow up.  

5.    What is the one thing you cannot resist? (food/dessert/candy/etc.)

The first three AC/DC records. 

6.    Where is your favorite place to be?

The Quetico.

7.    What is your favorite thing to do?

Play music with other people - which has been challenging for the past couple of years and is one of my major sources of frustration with the Covid era.

8.    Where is the best place you’ve traveled to and why? 

Tie: Tokyo and Mexico City, in large part because they are places that seem to be in a constant state of reinvention.

9.    Who is your biggest inspiration?

The British guitarist Derek Bailey, who was a part of the European Free Improvisation movement from the early 1960s through the aughts. I not only love his music, I also admire his lifelong, deep exploration of the idea of improvisation – not only in his own music and in global musical cultures, but as a kind of ethos.  

10.    What’s the coolest (or most important) trend you see today?

The resurgence in interest in analog technologies - LPs, cassettes, 78rpm records, but also paper books, film-based photography, and so on.

11.    What's one thing about you that surprises people?

I really like Disco.