Olga Viso | |
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![]() Viso speaking at the Walker Art Center | |
Born | Florida, U.S |
Education | Rollins College, Emory University |
Occupation(s) | Museum director, curator |
Organization(s) | Director of Curatorial Affairs and Selig Family Chief Curator, Phoenix Art Museum, Senior Advisor, Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, Executive Director, Walker Art Center, Director, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden |
Board member of | Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts |
Olga Viso (born 1966) is a Cuban American curator of modern and contemporary art and a museum director based at Phoenix Art Museum and Arizona State University's Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts in Tempe, Arizona. [1] She served as executive director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota from 2007 through 2017, and was curator of contemporary art and director of the Smithsonian Institution's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC from 1995-2007.
In 2023, Viso joined the executive leadership team of the Phoenix Art Museum as the Selig Family Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs and oversees the Museum's curatorial division as well as modern and contemporary art exhibitions and acquisitions. [2] In 2018, Viso joined the leadership team at Arizona State University's Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, where she is a senior advisor, building global arts partnerships, among them with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art [3] and James Turrell's Roden Crater Project. [4] Before coming to ASU, Viso was executive director of the Walker for ten years. There she oversaw a significant facilities expansion that integrated the Walker's main campus with the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, added a new entrance, [5] and sixteen new outdoor sculptures, including commissions with artists Nairy Baghramian, Katharina Fritsch, Theaster Gates, and Mark Manders. [6]
Viso joined the Walker Art Center in 2008, leaving her post as Director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden which she held since 2005. [7] She joined the Hirshhorn in 1995, working her way up from assistant curator. [8] Before that, Viso curated at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida (1993–95) and at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia (1989–93). She has served on the board of directors of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and belongs to the Association of Art Museum Directors. In 2013, President Barack Obama appointed Viso to the National Council on the Arts. [9]
Viso has curated many major exhibitions, including Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance 1972-1985, a retrospective of about 100 works shown at the Hirshhorn and the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2004. [10] Another exhibition Viso curated was Jim Hodges: Give More Than You Take. This show traveled from the Dallas Museum of Art (October 6, 2013 – January 12, 2014) to the Walker Art Center (February 15–May 11, 2014) then on to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (June 5–September 1, 2014) and ended at UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (October 5, 2014 – January 17, 2015). [11]
Viso resigned from her position as executive director of the Walker Art Center in 2017, and there was some speculation that her departure was related to the controversy surrounding Sam Durant's artwork Scaffold, though many museum professionals have publicly expressed support for Viso's handling of the work's reception. [12] The artist, Sam Durant, took primary accountability and transferred the rights of the work to the Dakota and agreed they would dismantle and ceremoniously burn the work. In 2021, plans to erect a monument on the site of the massacre were approved, a work by a Dakota artist, Angela Two Stars, in which visitors may sit and pay their respects. [13] Viso reflected on the controversy in an opinion piece for the New York Times in 2018, "Decolonizing the Art Museum: The Second Wave," where she acknowledged the colonizing forces at play in museums and the broader art world and urged museum leaders to "stop seeing activists as antagonists." [14]
Land art, variously known as Earth art, environmental art, and Earthworks, is an art movement that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, largely associated with Great Britain and the United States but that also includes examples from many countries. As a trend, "land art" expanded boundaries of art by the materials used and the siting of the works. The materials used were often the materials of the Earth, including the soil, rocks, vegetation, and water found on-site, and the sites of the works were often distant from population centers. Though sometimes fairly inaccessible, photo documentation was commonly brought back to the urban art gallery.
The Walker Art Center is a multidisciplinary contemporary art center in the Lowry Hill neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The Walker is one of the most-visited modern and contemporary art museums in the U.S.: together with the adjacent Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and Cowles Conservatory, it has an annual attendance of around 700,000 visitors. The museum's permanent collection includes over 13,000 modern and contemporary art pieces, including books, costumes, drawings, media works, paintings, photography, prints, and sculpture.
The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is an art museum beside the National Mall in Washington, D.C., United States. The museum was initially endowed during the 1960s with the permanent art collection of Joseph H. Hirshhorn. It was designed by architect Gordon Bunshaft and is part of the Smithsonian Institution. It was conceived as the United States' museum of contemporary and modern art and currently focuses its collection-building and exhibition-planning mainly on the post–World War II period, with particular emphasis on art made during the last 50 years.
James Turrell is an American artist known for his work within the Light and Space movement. He is considered the "master of light" often creating art installations that mix natural light with artificial color through openings in ceilings thereby transforming internal spaces by ever shifting and changing color.
The Minneapolis Sculpture Garden is an 11-acre (4.5 ha) park in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the United States. It is located near the Walker Art Center, which operates it in coordination with the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board. It reopened June 10, 2017, after a reconstruction that resulted with the Walker and Sculpture Garden being unified as one 19-acre campus. It is one of the largest urban sculpture gardens in the country, with 40 permanent art installations and several other temporary pieces that are moved in and out periodically.
Robert Gober is an American sculptor. His work is often related to domestic and familiar objects such as sinks, doors, and legs.
Jim Hodges is a New York-based installation artist. He is known for his mixed-media sculptures and collages that involve delicate artificial flowers, mirrors, chains as spiderwebs, and cut-up jeans.
Roden Crater is a cinder cone type of volcanic cone from an extinct volcano, with a remaining interior volcanic crater. It is located approximately 50 miles northeast of the city of Flagstaff in northern Arizona, United States.
The Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University is one of the largest comprehensive design and arts colleges in the nation, located within a dynamic 21st-century research university.
Judith Shea is an American sculptor and artist, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1948. She was awarded a degree in fashion design from the Parsons School of Design in 1969 and earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree there in 1975. This dual education formed the basis for her figure based works.
Melissa Chiu is an Australian museum director, curator and author, and the director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC.
The Arizona State University Art Museum is an art museum operated by Arizona State University, located on its main campus in Tempe, Arizona. The Art Museum has some 12,000 objects in its permanent collection and describes its primary focuses as contemporary art, including new media and "innovative methods of presentation"; crafts, with an emphasis on American ceramics; historic and contemporary prints; art from Arizona and the Southwestern United States, with an emphasis on Latino artists, and art of the Americas, with one historic American pieces and modernist and contemporary Latin American works.
Andrew Blauvelt is a Japanese-American curator, designer, educator, and writer. Since 2015 he has served as director of the Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
Thomas Kellein is a German art historian; gallery director; author; and curator. He was the Director at Kunsthalle Basel between 1988 and 1995, and the Director of the Kunsthalle Bielefeld between 1996 and 2010. He was the Director of the Chinati Foundation between 2011 and 2012.
Kerry Brougher is the founding director of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, California. He has served as curator at several museums, most recently as the curator and acting director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC.
Christine Y. Kim is an American curator of contemporary art. She is currently the Britton Family Curator-at-Large at Tate. Prior to this post, Kim held the position of Curator of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Before her appointment at LACMA in 2009, she was Associate Curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem in New York. She is best known for her exhibitions of and publications on artists of color, diasporic and marginalized discourses, and 21st-century technology and artistic practices.
Milena Kalinovska is a curator of visual arts and art educator. She has Czech and Russian ancestry, and is a triple national with British, American and Czech citizenship. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in its second year, 1985.
Suzanne Landau is an Israeli art museum curator. She was appointed the Director and Chief Curator of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in August 2012. She had previously been Curator of Contemporary Art at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem starting 1982 and its Chief Curator of Fine Arts there from 1998. Since her appointment in Tel Aviv, she has organized for the museum the Friends of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and the Acquisition Committee for Israeli Art.
Henriette Huldisch is a German-born American curator of contemporary art. She is currently the Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Prior to that, she was the Director of Exhibitions at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Boston, Massachusetts.
Martin Lee Friedman was an American museum curator who spent the majority of his career as the director of the Walker Art Center and oversaw the opening of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1989.
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