RoseLee Goldberg is an American-based art historian, author, critic and curator of performance art. She is most well known as being the founder and director of Performa, a performance art organisation. [1] She is also currently a Clinical Associate Professor of Arts Administration at New York University. [2]
Born in Durban, South Africa, Goldberg studied Political Science and Fine Arts at Wits University, Johannesburg. In 1970 she attained a degree in Art History from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. [3]
As director of the Royal College of Art 'Gulbenkian' Gallery, London, (1972–75) Goldberg set precedents [ citation needed ] for exhibiting modern and contemporary performance and organised exhibitions, performance series, and symposia on a broad range of multi-disciplinary artists including Marina Abramović, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Christian Boltanski, Brian Eno, the Kipper Kids, Piero Manzoni, Anthony McCall, and Christo and Jeanne Claude.
In 1975 Goldberg moved to New York City. [4] In 1978 Goldberg became a curator at The Kitchen, New York. [4] Her programming included the creation of an exhibition space, a video viewing room, and performance series.[ citation needed ] While at The Kitchen, Goldberg presented works by Laurie Anderson, Sherrie Levine and Roberto Longo. [5] She also organised performances by Philip Glass, Peter Gordon, Meredith Monk, and Robert Wilson and curated the first solo exhibitions of Jack Goldstein, David Salle, and Cindy Sherman, among others.[ citation needed ]
Goldberg has curated several performance series including "Six Evenings of Performance," as part of the High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture, exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York and Couleurs Superposees: Acte VII, a performance by Daniel Buren, (in association with Works & Process), at the Guggenheim, New York.[ citation needed ]
In 2001 Goldberg commissioned and produced Logic of the Birds, a multi-media performance by Shirin Neshat. [1] Developed in residency at Mass MOCA, Logic of the Birds was presented in workshop at the Kitchen in 2001, and premiered at the 2002 Lincoln Center Festival, and toured to the Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, and Artangel, London.
In 2004, Goldberg founded Performa, a non-profit multi-disciplinary arts organisation for performance art. [6] According to the organisation's Mission Statement, Performa was created to commission new performance projects, to present a dedicated performance biennial, to consult and collaborate with art institutions, and to offer ongoing education on performance art. [1] The organisation also hosts the Performa Biennial, which Goldberg considers "a form of radical urbanism to counteract the homogenisation of New York". [7] Artists who have created performances include William Kentridge. [8]
Goldberg has taught at New York University since 1987 and has lectured at Columbia University, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, Kyoto University of Art and Design, the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, the Tate Modern, London, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Yale University, among other institutions.
In 2009, Goldberg co-curated 100 Days, a travelling exhibition on the history of performance art with Klaus Biesenbach. [9]
In 2013 Goldberg produced rapper Jay-Z's performance art video for his song "Picasso Baby," which included notable artists such as Marina Abramović, Lawrence Weiner and Fred Wilson. [10]
She wrote a study of performance art, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present. Published in 1979 and now in its third edition (2001), Goldberg's book is now a key text for teaching performance in universities [ citation needed ] and has been translated into over seven languages, including Croatian, French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish .[ citation needed ]
In 2006 Goldberg was named a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. [11]
In 2010 Goldberg was awarded with the ICI Agnes Gund Curatorial Award. [12]
In 2013 Goldberg was ranked 24th on ArtReview's Power 100 list of the most influential figures in the contemporary art world. [13]
The Kitchen is a non-profit, multi-disciplinary avant-garde performance and experimental art institution located at 512 West 19th Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. As the organization undergoes a multi-year renovation it is currently sited at a satellite loft space in the West Village located at 163B Bank Street, where exhibitions and performances are regularly held. It was founded in Greenwich Village in 1971 by Steina and Woody Vasulka, who were frustrated at the lack of an outlet for video art. The space takes its name from the original location, the kitchen of the Mercer Arts Center which was the only available place for the artists to screen their video pieces. Although first intended as a location for the exhibition of video art, The Kitchen soon expanded its mission to include other forms of art and performance. In 1974, The Kitchen relocated to a building at the corner of Wooster and Broome Streets in SoHo, and incorporated as a not-for-profit arts organization. In 1987 it moved to its current location.
Shirin Neshat is an Iranian photographer and visual artist who lives in New York City, known primarily for her work in film, video and photography. Her artwork centers on the contrasts between Islam and the West, femininity and masculinity, public life and private life, antiquity and modernity, and bridging the spaces between these subjects.
Scott Benzel is an American visual artist, musician, performance artist, and composer. Benzel is a member of the faculty of the School of Art at California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA.
Jens Hoffmann Mesén is a writer, editor, educator, and exhibition maker. His work has attempted to expand the definition and context of exhibition making. From 2003 to 2007 Hoffmann was director of exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts London. He is the former director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art from 2007 to 2016 and deputy director for exhibitions and programs at The Jewish Museum from 2012 to 2017, a role from which he was terminated following an investigation into sexual harassment allegations brought forth by staff members. Hoffmann has held several teaching positions including California College of the Arts, the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti and Goldsmiths, University of London, as well as others.
Octavio Zaya is an art critic and curator, born in Las Palmas, and living in New York City since 1978. He is Director of Atlántica, a bilingual quarterly magazine published by CAAM ; he is Curator at Large and Advisor of MUSAC MUSAC](León, Spain);and a member of the advisory board of Performa. He is on the editorial board of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art and a NY correspondent for Flash Art. He was one of the curators of, as part of the group directed by Okwui Enwezor. He was also one of the curators of the first and second (1995 and 1997. The large list of exhibitions he has curated include In/Sight, African Photographers 1940 to the Present (Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1997, and Versiones del Sur. Latinoamerica at Centro de Arte Reina Sofia [. He was one of the curators of Fresh Cream, has authored more than a dozen books on artists, and has contributed to numerous other books and catalogues. He recently curated important exhibitions of the works of Cerith Wyn Evans and Paul Pfeiffer at MUSAC.
Steven Holmes is a Canadian curator based in Hartford, Connecticut.
Outset Contemporary Art Fund is an arts charity established in 2003, and based in London, England.
Countess Adelina von Fürstenberg-Herdringen is a Swiss curator and one of the field's pioneers in broadening contemporary art. Von Fürstenberg was one of the first curators to show an interest in non-European artists, thus opening the way for a multicultural approach in art. She also took a more global and flexible approach to contemporary art exhibitions, in bringing art into spaces such as monasteries, madrasas, large public buildings, squares, islands, and parks. Her objective is to give a larger context for visual art in making it a more vigorous part of our lives, in creating a more vivid dialogue for it with other arts, and relating it more to worldwide social issues.
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev is an Italian-American writer, art historian and exhibition maker who has been serving as the Director of Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea and Fondazione Francesco Federico Cerruti in Turin since 2016. She was Edith Kreeger Wolf Distinguished Visiting Professor in Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University (2013-2019). She is the recipient of the 2019 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence.
Johan Thom, is a visual artist who works across video, installation, performance and sculpture. He has been described as one of South Africa's foremost performance artists.
Jeanne Beth Greenberg Rohatyn is the owner of Salon 94, an art gallery with three locations in New York City.
"Picasso Baby" is a song by American hip hop artist Jay-Z from his twelfth studio album Magna Carta... Holy Grail. It is the second track on the album and features additional vocals by The-Dream and Zofia Borucka Moreno. The song was produced by Timbaland and Jerome "J-Roc" Harmon and contains a sample of "Sirens" by Adrian Younge. Following the release of the album, the song peaked at number 91 on the Billboard Hot 100 based on downloads only.
Eugenio Viola is an Italian art critic and curator based in Bogotá.
Defne Ayas is a curator, educator, and publisher in the field of contemporary art and its institutions. Ayas directed and advised many institutions and collaborative platforms across the world, including in China, South Korea, United States, Netherlands, Russia, Lithuania and Italy. She is known for conceiving exhibition and biennale formats within diverse geographies, in each instance composing interdisciplinary frameworks that provide historical anchoring and engagement with local conditions. Until June 2021, Ayas was the Artistic Director of 2021 Gwangju Biennale, together with Natasha Ginwala.
Performa is a non-profit arts organization well-known for the Performa Biennial, a festival of performance art that happens every two year in various venues and institutions in New York City. Performa was founded in 2004 by art historian and curator RoseLee Goldberg. Since 2005, Performa curators have included Charles Aubin, Defne Ayas, Tairone Bastien, Mark Beasley, Adrienne Edwards, Laura McLean-Ferris, Kathy Noble, Job Piston, and Lana Wilson. The organization commissions new works and tours performances premiered at the biennial. It also manages the work of choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer.
Claire Tancons is a curator, critic, and historian of art. She was born in Guadeloupe and is currently based in Paris, after spending three years in Berlin and eighteen in the US, of which she lived a decade in New Orleans.
Fyodor Borisovich Pavlov-Andreevich is a Brazilian artist, curator, and theater director.
Sozita Goudouna (Greek: Σωζήτα Γκουντούνα is a curator, professor and the author of Beckett's Breath: Anti-theatricality and the Visual Arts on Samuel Beckett's Breath, one of the shortest plays ever written for the theatre, published by Edinburgh University Press and released in the US by Oxford University Press. According to William Hutchings' review at the Comparative Drama Conference Series 15, Goudouna's book is surely the most ever said about the least in the entire history of literary criticism. In 2022 Goudouna initiated and teaches the MA on Breath Studies: Breath in the Visual and Performing Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London and is the editor of the Performance Research Issue On Breath
Mari Spirito is an American curator jointly based in Istanbul and New York. She is the Founding Director and curator of Protocinema, a non-profit arts organization realizing site-aware exhibitions around the world, in cities including Istanbul, New York, Tbilisi, Paris, Seoul, New Delhi, Moscow, East Lansing, Basel, and Lima.
Chrissie Iles is a British-American art curator, critic, and art historian. She is the Anne & Joel Ehrenkranz Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.
