Curatorial Practice
As a curator concentrating on contemporary art, I am privileged to speak directly to artists in their studios. From this primary research I gain understanding of each individual’s intent and approach to artmaking. I think of exhibition projects as collaborative efforts, with my purpose as a fulcrum between the creator and the public. Communication and mutual understanding also extend to my work with co-curators in realizing complex, thematically based group projects that include multiple voices and points of view.
Selected Solo Exhibitions
Thomas Joshua Cooper: Refuge. Parrish Art Museum 2019. Catalogue: Parrish Art Museum. The artist’s first solo exhibition in an American museum. Combining aesthetic, conceptual, and historic elements, Refuge centered on a series of images made throughout the East End of Long Island and along the Hudson River. The topography and habitat of these sites traced a consistent theme of exploration, exploitation, and transformation in the settlement of America. https://parrishart.org/exhibitions/thomas-joshua-cooper/.
Review https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/201907/thomas-joshua-cooper-80632
Keith Sonnier: Until Today. Parrish Art Museum. Co-organized with Jeffrey Grove. Parrish Art Museum, 2018. Catalogue: DelMonico Books/Prestel. Sonnier (1941-2020) was one of the first to incorporate light in sculpture—an innovation that formed the foundation of his wide-ranging art. Until Today was his first solo exhibition in an American museum in more than thirty-five years, and considered the full extent of his achievement through works from 1967 to the present. https://parrishart.org/exhibitions/keith-sonnier-until-today/
Review: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/01/arts/design/keith-sonnier-neon-hamptons-parrish.html
Andreas Gursky: Landscapes. Parrish Art Museum, 2015. Catalogue: Rizzoli. Focused exclusively on monumentally scaled images of landscapes, the exhibition explored Gursky’s relationship to renowned artists of the late nineteenth-century, specifically the German painter Caspar David Friedrich and the masters of the American Hudson River School. https://parrishart.org/exhibitions/andreas-gursky-landscapes/
Review: https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/andreas-gursky-parrish-art-museum
Alice Aycock: Some Stories Are Worth Repeating. Co-organized with Jonathan Fineberg. Parrish Art Museum, 2013. Catalogue: Yale University Press. This was the artist’s first solo exhibition in an American museum, and the first to comprehensively explore her works on paper. Ranging from mid-1970s architectural plans to intricate, large-scale computer generated images, the works in the exhibition brought to light the major themes that govern her artistic practice.
Chantal Akerman: Moving through Time and Space. Blaffer Art Museum, 2008 Catalogue: Blaffer Art Museum, in association with Marquand Press, Seattle, and Distributed Art Publishers, Inc. Akerman (1950-2015) was one of the few contemporary artists to cross over from commercial filmmaking to creating artworks intended for interactive engagement in museum or gallery settings. This exhibition, her first major traveling survey in the United States, focused on five projects spanning more than two decades of her career, was and the first to concentrate exclusively on her multi-media installations.
Review: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/13/arts/design/13aker.html
Jean Luc Mylayne. Blaffer Art Museum, 2007. Catalogue: Twin Palms Press, Inc., Santa Fe, NM. This was the first solo museum exhibition in the United States for an artist highly regarded and extensively exhibited in Europe. Mylayne’s sole subject is birds in the landscape, but he is not a traditional wildlife photographer; rather he situates his avian subjects so that their presence speaks to their surroundings. This exhibition featured a series of large-scale photographs created over a two-year period in the landscape surrounding Fort Davis, Texas, an area where the migration paths of Eastern, Western, and Mountain bluebirds converge.
Review: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/nyregion/02artsli.html
James Surls: The Splendora Years 1977-1997. Blaffer Art Museum, 2005. Catalogue: University of Texas Press, Austin. Surls is recognized as an icon of contemporary American sculpture. Focused on sculpture created over two decades living in Spendora Texas, the exhibition featured a range of works from table-top wood carvings to monumental forms, providing a rare look how the specificity of place can shape a widespread approach to sculptural experimentation.
Jessica Stockholder, Kissing the Wall: Works 1988-2004. Co-organized with Nancy Doll, Director, Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina/Greensboro. Blaffer Art Museum, 2004. Catalogue: Blaffer Art Museum/Weatherspoon Art Museum in association with Marquand Press, Seattle, and Distributed Art Publishers, Inc. Kissing the Wall, followed the trajectory from Stockholder’s early explorations through to the most current studio and on-site sculptural installations that showed her skills with both intimate and expansive works of art.
Review: https://glasstire.com/2004/09/02/jessica-stockholder/
Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration. Blaffer Art Museum, 2003. Catalogue: Princeton University Press. Close’s groundbreaking innovations in the field of printmaking over the course of his long career was the impetus for this expansive, ground-breaking exhibition that featured more than 100 prints, working proofs, and related objects, documenting the often highly experimental ways in which Close has challenged the expectations of traditional printing processes. This was the first full survey of this aspect of his work, which traveled to more than twenty-five museum venues internationally. The accompanying publication originally published in 2003 was updated in 2014. http://chuckclose.coe.uh.edu/ https://www.metmuseum.org/press/exhibitions/2003/chuck-close-prints--process-and-collaboration
Review: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/16/arts/art-review-savoring-chuck-close-by-savoring-the-process.html
Seeing and Believing: The Art of Nancy Burson. Co-organized with Lynn Gumpert, Director, Grey Art Gallery, New York University. Blaffer Art Museum, 2002. Catalogue: Twin Palms Press, Inc., Santa Fe, NM. The exhibition was the first comprehensive overview of Burson’s career and explored, through more than 100 photographic images dating from 1979 to 2000 and ranging in scale from miniscule to monumental, her abiding obsession with the malleability of the human face.
Review: https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/200205/nancy-burson-47628
Review: https://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/15/arts/photography-review-a-brew-of-faces-for-mixing-and-aging.html
Nothing Personal: Ida Applebroog - 1987-1998. Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1998. Catalogue: DAP/Distributed Art Publishers, Inc. This survey exhibition documented the works of one of the most influential and yet underrecognized artists of her generation. Spanning a decade of creative productivity, Nothing Personal brought renewed attention to Applebroog’s significance as a groundbreaking feminist artist, and revealed her power as a painter with monumental canvases and free standing hybrid sculpture/paintings that, while rooted in her earlier conceptual endeavors, exploded image-making in scope, scale, and meaning.
Review: https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/199807/ida-applebroog-51251
Petah Coyne: black/white/black. Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1996.Catalogue: Corcoran Gallery. Traveled to the High Museum. This exhibition focused on a series of monumentally scaled wax sculptures that emulated massive, hanging glass chandeliers. Simultaneously joyous and emotionally freighted with references to memento mori, funerial wreaths, birdcages, Coyne’s sculptures are both elegant objects and memory vessels, remnants of days gone by.
Robert Morris: Inability to Endure or Deny the World. Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1991. Catalogue: Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Morris, internationally renowned as an icon of Minimalist sculpture, began his artistic explorations as a painter—a fact, prior to this exhibition, not known to many. As content and narrative, especially related to political and social upheaval, became increasingly pressing on the artist’s mind, he returned to painting to create narratives addressing psychological states of being.
William T. Wiley: Struck! Sure? Sound/Unsound. Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1991. Catalogue: Corcoran Gallery, Washington, DC. Traveled to the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem; Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach. Celebrated as a major figure in Bay Area Funk Art, Wiley is recognized for paintings and sculptural assemblages that combine intricate drawings and written musings often animated by wordplay and puns addressing current social and political events.
Review: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-08-04-ca-4911-story.html
Selected Group Exhibitions
Telling Stories: Reframing the Narrative. Parrish Art Museum. Co-organized with David Pagel. Parrish Art Museum 2020. Catalogue: Parrish Art Museum. Telling Stories grew from a series of conversations with critic and art historian David Pagel. Together we developed this exhibition to give voice to how artists across generations, career levels, and personal narratives use visual storytelling to shape our understanding of reality. Planned to debut in April 2020, because of the closure of museums around the world due to the global coronavirus, this project now exists in a digital format and through the exhibition catalogue. https://parrishart.org/about-2/
From Lens to Eye to Hand: Photorealism 1968 to Today. Parrish Art Museum, 2017. Catalogue: DelMonico Books/Prestel. This project was inspired by my introduction to a trove of more than one hundred intimately scaled watercolors created by two generations of the preeminent Photorealist artists. Mostly created in the mid- to late 70s, and held in a private collection, they had not been seen together in a public institution. The exhibition offered a new look at the often misunderstood and sometimes negatively criticized movement in contemporary art history by exploring how using a new medium changed artistic approaches to realism and narrative. https://parrishart.org/exhibitions/from-lens-to-eye-to-hand/
Review: https://detroitartreview.com/2018/06/photorealism-flint-institute-of-arts/
Unfinished Business: Paintings from the 1970s and 1980s by Ross Bleckner, Eric Fischl, and David Salle. Co-organized with David Pagel. Parrish Art Museum, 2016. Catalogue: DelMonico Books/Prestel. Three artists met in the early 1970s at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles. Moving to New York in the 1980s, they immediately established their places as influential painters. In this exhibition I explored their long friendship and how their distinct styles, philosophies, and convictions shaped their individual development. https://parrishart.org/exhibitions/unfinished-business/
Review: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/19/arts/design/searching-for-light-in-the-darkness-of-the-80s.html
Damaged Romanticism: A Mirror of Modern Emotion. Co-organized with David Pagel. Blaffer Art Museum, 2008. Catalogue: D. Giles Publishing, Ltd., London. This exhibition arose from my longtime fascination with how life’s losses and profound disappointments can be transformed from despair into optimism through a journey of creative renewal. Inspired by Thomas Dunn’s 1998 Critical Inquire essay “Resignation” the exhibition featured works in all media by fifteen international artists whose art is underscored by the clash of current events with historical influences, especially the European romantic movement, imagining a “damaged romanticism” where the historical movement’s exoticism and fantasy have been reshaped by the clarity of pragmatic realism. https://greyartgallery.nyu.edu/exhibition/damaged-romantic-011309-04409/
Review: https://www.chron.com/entertainment/article/Blaffer-exhibit-more-than-damaged-goods-1538905.php
Review: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/arts/design/13roma.html
Corcoran Gallery of Art Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting. Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1998-1995. Catalogue: Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Established in 1907, the Corcoran Biennial was the sixth oldest continuous exhibition series in the United states, and the only one to focus exclusively on painting. During my tenure as Curator of Contemporary Art at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, one of my primary responsibilities was to organize this biennial project. As a launching pad for deep research into living artists working throughout the country, the Biennial offered me an extraordinary opportunity to gauge a national perspectives on the American panorama of painterly exploration. As a framework for I posited these three exhibitions as a series, each concentrating on a particular painterly approach.
42nd Biennial, presented in1991 focused on artists exploring new strategies for abstract painting, featuring thirteen artists from across the United States. Artists included: L.C. Armstrong, Nancy Chun, Lydian Dona, Willy Heeks, Tishan Hsu, Judy Mannarino, Michael Miller, Sabina Ott, Irene Pijoan, Lari Pittman, Eldridge Rawls, Thomas Eric Stanton, and Andrea Way.
43rd Biennial, presented in 1993 included 91 works by twenty-five artists who centered their practice on figurative painting. The exhibition included established artists such as Ida Applebroog, Charles Garabedian, Leon Golub, and Nancy Spero; midcareer artists, including Phyllis Bramson, Michael Byron, Carole Caroompas, and Hung Liu; and younger artists such as Kim Dingle, Inga Frick, Kerry James Marshall, Manuel Ocampo, and Deborah Oropallo.
Review: https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/291477/go-figure/
Review: https://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/21/arts/art-view-the-corcoran-gives-new-meaning-to-biennial.html
44th Biennial: Painting Outside Painting, presented in 1995 concentrated on artists who pushed the traditional definitions of paint on canvas by incorporating a wide variety of materials ranging from melted wax to plants and flowers to assemblages of colorful household objects and both two-and three-dimensional structures. Participating artists included Polly Apfelbaum, John Beech, Rodney Carswell, Frandra Chang, Jacci Den Hartog, Sam Gilliam, James Hyde, Peter Hopkins, Heather Hutchison, John McCracken, Carter Potter, Robin Rose, Charles Spurrier, Jessica Stockholder, Lauren Szold, Fred Tomaselli, and Merrill Wagner.
Review: https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1996-01-14-1996014115-story.html