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 200 solo and 750 group exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe, including exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Tate Modern, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Upcoming projects and exhibitions include: Bonnefantenmuseum Maastricht in the Netherlands; Marian Goodman Gallery in New York; Galerie Meert Rihoux in Brussels; Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld, Germany; Fondazione Prada in Milan; and a traveling retrospective that begins at the Tate Modern in London in 2009. Among his numerous awards are the Governors Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts in California and the Oscar Kokoschka Prize from Austria. |
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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 is an independent curator and philanthropic consultant. She is the Programs Director for Creative Link for the Arts (formerly the Penny McCall Foundation), an organization focused on supporting individual artists, curators and arts writers as well as facilitating partnership philanthropy in the visual arts. She is also the curator for Eileen Harris Norton's art collection. Her forthcoming projects include an exhibition for the California Community Foundation celebrating its 20th anniversary of awarding individual artist grants and a group exhibition for Estacion Tijuana in Tijuana, Mexico. Previously, she was the Curator of the Collections of Eileen and Peter Norton and the Director of Arts Programs for the Peter Norton Family Foundation. |
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Weston Naef
Senior Curator, Department of Photographs, J. Paul Getty Museum
Naef joined the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1984 as the founding curator 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 guided the growth of the museum's photographs collection, along with its exhibition and publication program, for nearly twenty-five years. Since February 2008, he has been on a leave of absence to finish a book, Carleton Watkins: The Complete Mammoth Plate Photographs, and the related exhibition, Dialogue Among Giants: Carleton Watkins and the Rise of Photography in California. |
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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. The current exhibition Between Earth and Heaven: The Architecture of John Lautner represents another groundbreaking exhibition under her guidance. 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. |
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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; Ecstasy: In and About Altered States. Most recently, he organized MURAKAMI, a retrospective exhibition of the work of Takashi Murakami, and Robert Rauschenberg: Combines, the most complete survey of the artist’s Combine work ever mounted. Major publications accompanied 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 recipient of the Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies Award for Curatorial Excellence. |
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