John Baldessari
Artist
Baldessari rose to prominence in the late 1960s as a leading conceptual artist, combining text with painting, photography, sound, and other media. His work has been featured in over 120 solo and 300 group exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe, including recent exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Tate Modern, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Among his numerous awards are the Governors Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts in California and the Oscar Kokoschka Prize from Austria. He is preparing an upcoming project at Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, as well as retrospectives in Austria at Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, and the Kunsthaus, Graz, and at the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Nîmes, France. Baldessari teaches at UCLA.
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Kris Kuramitsu
Former Curator for the Collections of Eileen Harris-Norton and Peter Norton and former Director of Arts Programs for the Peter Norton Family Foundation
Kuramitsu was instrumental in the development of both Norton foundations and their histories of acquiring work by emerging artists in all media. She recently published an essay about the Norton Collections in the catalogue Linkages and Themes for the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, California. In 2005, she published an essay on Hew Locke in the catalogue accompanying his solo exhibition at the New Art Gallery in Walsall, England. Prior to this, she was an administrator for a non-profit public art organization in Los Angeles. Kuramitsu received a BA in Art History from Pomona College and an MA in Art History with an emphasis in 20th century art from UCLA.
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Weston Naef
Curator of Photographs, J. Paul Getty Museum
Naef joined the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1984 as one of the first curators in the Museum’s then newly established Department of Photographs. Prior to this, Naef was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He is the author of numerous publications, including The Collection of Alfred Stieglitz: Fifty Pioneers in Modern Photography, The J. Paul Getty Museum Handbook of the Photographs Collection, and Photographers of Genius at the Getty. Naef has guided the growth of the Museum’s photographs collection, along with its exhibition and publication program, for over twenty years.
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Catherine Opie
Artist and Professor of Photography, UCLA
Opie’s photographs have been exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions have been organized by the Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; the Photographers’ Gallery, London; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among others. Her work is in the permanent collections of numerous institutions, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Opie received the Larry Aldrich Award in 2004 and is also the recipient of the Washington University Freund Fellowship (1999) and the Citibank Private Bank Emerging Artist Award (1997). Opie was Professor of Fine Art at Yale University before joining the faculty at UCLA.
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Ann Philbin
Director of the Hammer Museum, UCLA
Since her arrival at the Hammer Museum in 1999, Philbin has increased the Museum’s public profile by presenting a dynamic exhibition program for contemporary art and expanding the museum’s range of public programs. Her exhibition Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective, co-organized with and curated by Elizabeth Smith of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, received the International Association of Art Critics’ award for best monographic show in a national museum for 2003-04. Prior to joining the Hammer Museum, Philbin was director of The Drawing Center in New York for nine years and is often credited with transforming the center into one of New York’s most innovative art spaces. Philbin was also the Director of the Curt Marcus Gallery and the Curator of The Ian Woodner Family Collection of old master drawings.
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Paul Schimmel
Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Since 1990, Schimmel has organized such major exhibitions as Helter Skelter: Los Angeles Art in the 1990s; Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition, 1955-62; Sigmar Polke Photoworks: When Pictures Vanish; Robert Gober; Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-79; Charles Ray; and most recently Ecstasy: In and About Altered States, with major publications accompanying each exhibition. He also initiated the Focus Series of one-person exhibitions at MOCA, presenting work by Arshile Gorky, Jennifer Pastor, Franz West, and Richard Wilson. Before joining MOCA, Schimmel was the Chief Curator/Curator of Exhibitions and Collections at the Newport Harbor Art Museum (now Orange County Museum of Art) in Newport Beach, California. He has lectured at
numerous art institutions around the world, has served as a National Endowment for the Arts panelist, and was a recent recipient of the Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies Award for Curatorial Excellence.
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