Tuesday, October 28, 2014, 7pm
Hunter College
Lang Recital Hall
Hunter North Building, 4th floor
New York, NY
The Hunter College Department of Art and Art History is pleased to announce a public lecture by Ann Goldstein, the inaugural Foundation To-Life, Inc. Arthur and Carol Kaufman Goldberg Visiting Curator, Tuesday, October 28, at 7pm in the Lang Recital Hall, located in the Hunter North Building, entrance on East 69th Street between Lexington and Park Avenues in Manhattan. Ann Goldstein was Director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam from 2010 to 2013; prior to her appointment at the Stedelijk, she served as Senior Curator at MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, from 2001 to 2009, the culmination of a 26-year career there.
In Los Angeles, Ms. Goldstein organized important one-person exhibitions of some of the most significant artists of the contemporary period, including Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Martin Kippenberger, Barbara Kruger, and Cady Noland. Ms. Goldstein is best known for a trio of large, carefully researched exhibitions she realized at MOCA, surveying the history of art since the 1960s: A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation (1989), A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958–1968 (2004), and 1965–1975: Reconsidering the Object of Art (1995–96).
The Stedelijk Museum was undergoing major renovations of its original 19th-century building and had begun construction of a new wing when Ms. Goldstein arrived in Amsterdam in 2010. Her talk takes its title from her first exhibition there, Taking Place, which sited the works of 20 artists—from Karel Appel to Lawrence Weiner—in the still unfinished rooms of the old building. While at the Stedelijk, Ms. Goldstein oversaw major monographic exhibitions of the artists Aernout Mik, Jo Baer, and Lucy McKenzie, as well as Blues Before Sunrise, a large-scale public work by artist Steve McQueen. She was the originating curator of the recent Mike Kelley exhibition, which traveled from Amsterdam to Paris and New York, where it was seen at MoMA PS1 in the summer and fall of 2013, before closing at MOCA in Los Angeles.
Described by Art in America as “forthright and strong-willed,” Goldstein was awarded the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence by the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in April 2012.
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. During her weeklong residency, Ms. Goldstein will meet with students individually and in small groups, and participate in curatorial seminars taught by Hunter faculty. 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 Open Work in Latin America, New York & Beyond: Conceptualism Reconsidered 1967–1978 (2013), Peripheral Visions: Italian Photography in Context, 1950s–Present (2012), Notations: The Cage Effect Today (2012), and Objects of Devotion and Desire: Medieval Relic to Contemporary Art (2011).
