CLIP ART: Valerie Cassel Oliver / Senior Curator / Contemporary Arts Museum Houston

Clipped from "Artworld" column in May 2011 issue of Art in America magazine.

 

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MEDIA NEWS: Naomi Beckwith Named Curator at MCA Chicago

Image Credit: Photo by Paul Mpagi Sepuya.

Naomi Beckwith has been appointed the new Curator at the  Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago. Beckwith is currently the Associate Curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem, where she has focused on themes of identity and conceptual practices in contemporary art, artists of African descent, and managing the Artists-in-Residence program. She will assume her new responsibilities at the MCA on May 11, 2011.

                                                                         

�Naomi is an up-and-coming talent in our field who has wide-ranging interests and experiences,� says Michael Darling,  James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator of MCA. �Her work at the Studio Museum demonstrates a highly intelligent and complex approach to the art of our time. Her exhibition 30 Seconds off an Inch, in particular, was groundbreaking. As we expand our commitment to artist residencies, Naomi brings great expertise in this area and her scholarship on African-American art will strengthen the MCA's Collection. Naomi is outgoing, confident, and eloquent which makes her a great ambassador for the museum. We are excited to welcome her to Chicago and bring her voice to our programming.�

Beckwith said, "As a native Chicagoan, I am delighted to return to this great city and to practice my curatorial craft at this vibrant community and forward-thinking museum. The MCA was formative to my education in contemporary art: from the original galleries on Ontario Street, to the cultural and architectural beacon that it is in its current formation. I very much look forward to working with Madeleine, Michael, and the entire MCA team to shape its future trajectory of major international programming in the visual and performing arts."

At the Studio Museum, Beckwith's most recent projects include Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Any Number of Preoccupations (2010-11) and Zwelethu Mthethwa: Inner Views (2010), two acclaimed exhibitions of work by international artists, as well as 30 Seconds off an Inch (2009-10), a major group exhibition that explored ways in which artists playfully and irreverently engage with black culture, history, and identity in the wake of mid-twentieth-century neo-avant-garde movements.

Prior to her tenure at the Studio Museum, Beckwith was the 2005-07 Whitney Lauder Curatorial Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, where she worked on numerous cutting-edge exhibitions including Locally Localized Gravity (2007), an exhibition and program of events focused on over 100 artists whose practices are social, participatory, and communal. Beckwith has also been the BAMart project coordinator at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a Helena Rubenstein Critical Studies Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and a guest blogger for Art21. She has curated and co-curated exhibitions at New York alternative spaces Recess Activities, Cuchifritos, and Artists Space.

Beckwith received an MA with Distinction from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, completing her Master's thesis on Adrian Piper and Carrie Mae Weems, and a BA in history from Northwestern University in Illinois. She was a 2009 grantee of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and was named the 2011 Leader to Watch by ArtTable. She serves on the boards of the Laundromat Project (New York) and Res Artis (Amsterdam).

Source link:

http://www.mcachicago.org/media/

POST: Unframed The LACMA Blog / A Conversation with Franklin Sirmans / May 14, 2010

Seeing Anew: A Conversation with Franklin Sirmans

Franklin Sirmans hasn�t wasted any time settling into his new post as head of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He�s been visiting studios, galleries, and private collections around town, getting to know the works of art in our permanent collection, and planning upcoming exhibitions. Before coming to LACMA, Franklin served as curator of modern and contemporary art at the Menil Collection in Houston, and worked as an independent curator, critic, writer, and editor. Now that he�s been here for a few months, I checked in to see how he was adjusting to his new surroundings.

What brought you to LA?
It was the opportunity to work with the team assembled here�including director Michael Govan, and my colleagues throughout the museum�at a really exciting time. Also, right now, the art conversation in Los Angeles is so interesting. Art in Los Angeles is still so young. We�re looking back to the grand old past of, what? The 1950s and 60s. We are still in the midst of a conversation about the formation of the art scene in Los Angeles with the people who were here then and are still here now�Ed Ruscha, Joe Goode, Betye Saar, Samella Lewis, just to name a few. That fascinates me.

What are you finding out about Los Angeles?
I�m still checking out the neighborhoods, seeing new places. I went to see Judson Powell in Compton the other day to talk about his work at the Watts Towers in the past and his present work there, building an arts and cultural center.
I feel like I know the Culver City scene but I know that�s very little in the scope of things. That said, Lauri Firstenberg at Laxart, Suzanne Vielmetter Projects, and Roberts & Tilton are always interesting.
I�ve done studio visits with Betye Saar, who has a wonderful piece in the collection, and Paul McCarthy, also in the collection. I recently did a visit with the curator Samella Lewis, whose work I grew up reading.
I knew a lot of artists before coming here. But I didn�t know the collectors and collections in Los Angeles, so I�m trying to get to know them now, as well as artists. I�m also really interested in what�s happening outside the confines of visual art�what people are doing in film, dance, and music, and the vernacular of the city.

What else, besides art?
I watch a lot of soccer.

What do you miss about Houston and the Menil Collection?
The atmosphere there is so serene. You have the Byzantine Fresco Chapel across the street from the Mark Rothko Chapel. Right there, you also have Barnett Newman�s Broken Obelisk and down the street you have the Menil Collection and behind that you have Cy Twombly�s gallery and behind that you have Dan Flavin�s gallery. It�s like a perfect art experience.
But in a lot of ways, that�s what�s happening here at LACMA, right now.

What�s it like getting to know the collection here?
I�m interested in exploring the synergy between the Broad collection and the LACMA collection, and we�re doing that already in some new installations this fall.
The modern collection here includes some really special pieces�the Giacomettis, for example. The Picassos, those Brancusi birds.
There are some wonderful works I would like to see installed�a Marlene Dumas painting that�s been out on loan for a while, a work by John Outterbridge that I really want to see, and Toba Khedoori, a young artist who interests me. We have a wonderful piece of hers in the collection. It�s huge�I�d really love to see that on view. Not easy to do.
I want to play on the strengths of the collection, those special objects that we have at hand, and also the relationship we have with artists here in Los Angeles, which is something that will play a prominent role in a future exhibition. More news on that shortly.
I want to look at contemporary art in the context of the encyclopedic museum. That was part of the hook, the reason I came here. How, as contemporary viewers, do we look at the art of the past? How can artists help us see the past anew?
Amy Heibel

http://lacma.wordpress.com/2010/05/14/seeing-anew-a-conversation-with-franklin-sirmans/