Jane Livingston

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Jane Shelton Livingston (born 12 February 1944) is an American art curator. She is the author and co-author of numerous books and catalogs.

Contents

Life and work

Livingston was born in Upland, California.

From 1967 to 1975, she was curator of 20th-century art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She was editor of the Richard Diebenkorn Catalogue Raisonné and as of 2011 was working as an independent curator. [1]

In 1975 she became associate director and chief curator at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, but resigned in 1989, prompted by the Corcoran's cancellation of a show of work by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. [2] [3] Livingston had been on sabbatical, writing a book under a Guggenheim Fellowship when the exhibition was cancelled; [4] when she returned, she made it clear that she would not have cancelled the show. [5] Livingston had arranged the installation, which was financed in part by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). [6]

She organized a major museum exhibition of Chicano art, [7] and, together with Marcia Tucker, the first major museum exhibition of Bruce Nauman. [1] Other exhibitions include her show of National Geographic, "illustrative" photography. [8] She and curator John Beardsley also curated an exhibition of black outsider artists in 1982. [9] This show "marked an explosion of interest in the work of African American artists." [10] Livingston's The New York School of Photography (1992) has been described as a "path-breaking study", first identifying the titular subject. [11] Livingston curated a show of John Alexander's works at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2008. [12]

Livingston's work on The Art of Richard Diebenkorn (1997) helped produce a book that collected the most important works of Richard Diebenkorn, who had been under-represented in publishing. [13] The catalogue raisonné she compiled on the artist appeared in 2016.

Publications

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References

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