Monday, May 16, 2016, 7pm
Roosevelt house
47-49 E 65th St
New York, NY 10065
www.hunter.cuny.edu
The Hunter College Department of Art and Art History is pleased to announce a public lecture by Valerie Cassel Oliver, the spring 2016 Foundation To-Life, Inc. Arthur and Carol Kaufman Goldberg Visiting Curator, Monday, May 16, at 7pm in the Roosevelt House auditorium. An integral part of Hunter College since 1943, Roosevelt House is located at 47-49 East 65th Street, between Park and Madison Avenues in Manhattan.
Valerie Cassel Oliver is the senior curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, where she has organized numerous exhibitions including Splat Boom Pow! The Influence of Cartoons in Contemporary Art (2003); the acclaimed Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970 (2005); Black Light/White Noise: Sound and Light in Contemporary Art (2007); Cinema Remixed and Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image with Dr. Andrea Barnwell Brownlee (2009); Hand+Made: The Performative Impulse in Art and Craft; and a major retrospective on Benjamin Patterson entitled Born in the State of Flux/us (both 2010); as well as the survey, Donald Moffett: The Extravagant Vein (2011). In 2012, she mounted the project Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art and in 2014, a major survey of drawings by Houston-based and internationally recognized artist, Trenton Doyle Hancock entitled Trenton Doyle Hancock: Skin and Bones–20 Years of Drawing. Both exhibitions toured extensively. Most recently, Cassel Oliver mounted a survey of work by Jennie C. Jones entitled Compilation, on view at CAM Houston through March 2017.
In 2000, Cassel Oliver was one of six curators selected to organize the Biennial for the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In 2007, she received a Getty Curatorial Research Fellowship for initial research for the exhibition on Benjamin Patterson and was a fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership in 2009. In 2011, she was awarded the prestigious David C. Driskell Award for her scholarly excellence and contribution to the field of African American art and culture. Cassel Oliver’s two-week workshop at Hunter, entitled “Breaking Black: Strategies in Sustaining Dialogues About Black Artists,” examined concepts, issues, and debates central to the framing and presentation of black contemporary art in American museums.
The Foundation To-Life, Inc. Arthur and Carol Kaufman Goldberg Curatorial Workshops are designed to bring curators of international stature to the Hunter campus to work with students in the MA program in Art History and the MFA program in Studio Art for an extended period of time. Valerie Cassel Oliver is the fourth Foundation To-Life curator, following Ann Goldstein, Hamza Walker, and Fabrice Stroun. The Foundation To-Life Curatorial Workshop program recognizes the curatorial interests and ambitions of Hunter students and the Hunter College Art Galleries’ longstanding commitment to exhibitions whose themes, theses, and checklists have been developed and honed by our students. In the past few years, faculty-initiated, seminar-based exhibitions have included Boundless Reality: Traveler Artists’ Landscapes of Latin America from The Patricia Phelps De Cisneros Collection and Critical Gestures/Contested Spaces: Art and Politics in France in the 1960s (both 2016), Open Work in Latin America, New York & Beyond: Conceptualism Reconsidered 1967-1978 (2013), Peripheral Visions: Italian Photography in Context, 1950s-Present (2012), and Objects of Devotion and Desire: Medieval Relic to Contemporary Art (2011).
The event is free, but seating is limited. First priority to attendees who register online.
