events

Valerie Cassel Oliver

Valerie Cassel Oliver is senior curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas. Prior to her tenure at CAMH she was director of the Visiting Artist Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a program specialist at the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2000 she was one of six curators selected to organize the Biennial for the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Cassel Oliver 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 (2010); a major retrospective on Benjamin Patterson, Born in the State of Flux/us, as well as the survey Donald Moffett: The Extravagant Vein (2011). In 2012, she mounted the project, Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, currently touring through 2015. In April of this year, she opened 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. The exhibition is slated to travel to Akron, Ohio for presentation in September 2014.

Larissa Harris

Larissa Harris is Curator at the Queens Museum, where she has organized a variety of exhibitions, such as “Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center” with Damon Rich and the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) (2009); the first US museum show of Korean artist Sung Hwan Kim (2011); QM’s biennial, “Queens International 2012”; a retrospective and new projects with the performance group Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) (2014); and a major new work with Mexican artist Pedro Reyes, The People’s United Nations (pUN) (2013–14). In addition, she helped organize a studio and artist services program at the Queens Museum, and an artist residency in Corona, Queens. Most recently she organized 13 Most Wanted Men: Andy Warhol and the 1964 World’s Fair in partnership with the Andy Warhol Museum. This exhibition will travel to AWM in September 2014.

Miranda Lash

Miranda Lash is Curator of Contemporary Art at the Speed Art Museum. Her exhibition, Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art, co-organized with Trevor Schoonmaker, Chief Curator at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, is an expansive inquiry into Southern identity and the landscape and politics of the South. Southern Accent is accompanied by an extensive catalog published by Duke University Press. Lash is on the Artistic Director’s Council for Prospect.4, the fourth iteration of the international triennial art exhibition Prospect New Orleans, which opens in November 2017. In November 2017 Lash will also be opening BRUCE CONNER: FOREVER AND EVER, an exhibition of film and works on paper by Bruce Conner, co-curated with Dean Otto, Curator of Film at the Speed. Prior to the Speed, Lash was the founding curator of modern and contemporary art at the New Orleans Museum of Art from 2008 to 2014. At NOMA she organized over twenty exhibitions, including the traveling retrospective exhibition Mel Chin: Rematch; Swoon: Thalassa; Camille Henrot: Cities of Ys; Wayne Gonzales: Light to Dark / Dark to Light and Parallel Universe: Quintron and Miss Pussycat Live at City Park. Lash holds a B.A. in the History of Art and Architecture from Harvard University and an M.A. in Art History from Williams College.

Dominic Willsdon

Dominic Willsdon is an educator and curator. He is the Director of the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, where he is also associate professor in art education. He was formerly Leanne and George Roberts Curator of Education and Public Practice at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, a Pedagogical Curator of the 9th Mercosul Biennial (2013) and a Co-Curator of the 9th Liverpool Biennial (2016), and Curator of Public Programs at Tate Modern (2000-2005). Recent curatorial projects include Public Knowledge (2016-19) and Suzanne Lacy: We Are Here (2019). Recent publications include Public Servants: Art and the Crisis of the Common Good (MIT, 2016).