Biography

Currently, I hold The Henry and Lois Foster Chair in Contemporary Art and I am the Distinguished Curator-in-Residence at Emerson College, Boston. For the past thirty years I have worked as a museum curator and director in both university and public museums, specializing in modern and contemporary art, as well as nineteenth-century American art. I earned both my Bachelors and Master’s degrees in Art History from Indiana University at Bloomington, and completed the J. Paul Getty Leadership Institute for Museum Management in 1997.

As the inaugural Foster Chair, I teach contemporary art history and I curate experimental contemporary art exhibitions in Emerson’s Huret and Spector Gallery. My exhibits include film screenings of Bruce Conner and Aldo Tambellini and site specific installations by Erwin Redl, the Austrian light artist, and Santiago Cucullu, the Argentinean installation artist, and a new series of exhibitions, The Next Generation, which present the work of the most talented graduate students from New England’s art schools. I have curated a three-story tall LED wall on Emerson's Arcade Building on Washington Street, featuring Jim Campbell, John Craig Freeman, Brian Knep, and Erwin Redl. Currently, I am working towards a publication on Zero and postwar European Art and on a documentary film on German museum director and art historian, Alexander Dorner.

Previously, I served as the Chief Curator of the Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin (6/05-8/08), I managed a curatorial staff of 45 and curated a collection of over 25,000 works of art and an archive of over 20,000 pieces. Responsible for the temporary exhibition program I curated nationally touring exhibitions of Bruce Nauman and Andy Warhol. As The Henry and Lois Foster Director of The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, (1998-2005) I curated the finest collection of modern and contemporary art in New England (approx. 7,000 works of art), and reinvigorated the museum’s tradition of cutting-edge contemporary art exhibitions. The Rose became recognized for introducing such contemporary artists as Yun-fei Ji, Roxy Paine, and Robin Rhode.

As the Curator (1982-89) and then Director (1989-98) of the Washington University Gallery of Art, St. Louis (now the Mildred Kemper Museum of Art), I built the museum’s program on the excellent collections of nineteenth-century, modern and contemporary art. I curated a series of exhibits that earned awards and traveled internationally. And, in my first professional position as the Curator of The Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Indiana (1979-82), I activated the exhibitions programs, built the collections, and instituted professional practices leading towards a new 45,000sf museum by Walter Netsch, SOM, Chicago, within a Louis I. Kahn civic arts complex, that opened in 1984.

Over thirty years my exhibitions that have been recognized in such periodicals as the The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Artforum, and Flash Art. And, I have earned critical distinctions such as the Best Gallery Show of the Year from the Boston Globe for Erwin Redl’s FADE (2008), and the International Art Critics Association, Boston Chapter, Best Monographic Exhibition, for Roxy Paine (2002). My publications, A Gallery of Modern Art (1994) and Catherine Wagner (1996) have won design awards from the American Association of Museums. In addition, my exhibition of Robert S. Duncanson was part of the Atlanta Olympics (1996), and the book was selected by Choice magazine (American Library Association) as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1994.

Further information is available on the various pages of my website.