Laura Hoptman was appointed curator of contemporary art at Carnegie
Museum of Art in 2001. She had previously served as assistant curator in the Department
of Drawings at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from 1995 to 2001; guest curator at
the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, from 1993 to 1995; and curator of The Bronx
Museum of the Arts, New York, from 1987 to 1990.
Hoptman has organized numerous exhibitions on contemporary art, including the
re-installation of Carnegie Museum of Art’s permanent collection (2003) and Hello, My
Name Is... (co-organized with Elizabeth Thomas), both at Carnegie Museum of Art,
Pittsburgh (2003), and Drawing Now: Eight Propositions, Museum of Modern Art, Queens
(2002). At MoMA, Hoptman was co-curator of Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama, 1958–1968 (1998),
and curator of, among others, Project #60: John Currin, Elizabeth Peyton, Luc Tuymans
(1997); both exhibitions were cited as one of the ten best exhibitions of the year by
Artforum.
Among Hoptman’s recent publications are Drawing Now: Eight Propositions (Museum of
Modern Art, 2002) and Yayoi Kusama (Phaidon Press, 2000). She was also the co-editor
of Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for East and Central European Art since the 1950s,
jointly published in 2003 by the Museum of Modern Art and MIT Press. Her articles have
appeared in Parkett, Flash Art, Harper’s Bazaar, and other journals.
Advisory Committee
Francesco Bonami
Over the last decade, Francesco Bonami, the Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of
Contemporary Art, Chicago, has served as curator for many international exhibitions
in Europe and the United States (with accompanying catalogues), including the 2003
Venice Biennale; Manifesta 3, European Biennial of Contemporary Art, Ljubljana,
Slovenia (2001); Examining Pictures, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Whitechapel
Art Gallery, London, and UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (1999); Unfinished History,
Walker Art Center (1998–99); and TRUCE: Echoes of Art in an Age of Endless Conclusions,
2nd Site Santa Fe Biennale (1997). He is currently at work on Universal Experience:
Art, Life and the Tourist’s Eye, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2005).
Bonami is a widely published author of books, catalogue essays, articles and reviews.
His recent publications include The Fourth Sex: Adolescent Extremes (Charta, 2003)
and the monograph Maurizio Cattelan (Phaidon Press, 1999).
Gary Garrels
Gary Garrels has been chief curator in the Department of Drawings at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York since 2001. Prior to this appointment, he was the Elise S.
Haas Chief Curator and curator of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art. He also has served on the curatorial staffs of the Walker Art Center,
Minneapolis; Dia Center for the Arts, New York; and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology’s Hayden Gallery, Cambridge. An organizer of numerous exhibitions featuring
contemporary artists from around the world, Garrels’ recent exhibitions include
retrospectives of the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt (2000) and the Swiss multimedia
artist Dieter Roth (2004).
He is the author of Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective (Yale University Press, 2000) and, with
Robert Storr, Willem de Kooning: The Late Paintings, The 1980s (San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art and Walker Art Center, 1995).
Midori Matsui
Midori Matsui is a Tokyo-based art critic and scholar. She has written extensively on
Japanese and Western art and culture, and she teaches at Tama and Musashino Art
universities. Her critical perspective combines a strong regional focus with an
international outlook and reputation.
Matsui writes for a wide variety of periodicals and is the author of Art in a New World:
Post-Modern Art in Perspective (Asahi Press, 2000). She was a contributing author to
Wolfgang Tillmans (Phaidon, 2002), Painting at the Edge of the World (Walker Art
Center, 2001), Public Offerings (Thames & Hudson, 2001), and Takashi Murakami: The
Meaning of the Nonsense of the Meaning (Abrams, 2000). Matsui is currently writing a
book about contemporary Japanese art in its cultural context.
Cuauhtémoc Medina
An independent art critic, curator, and historian, Cuauhtémoc Medina teaches at the
National University of Mexico, where he is a researcher at the Instituto de
Investigaciones Estéticas. He is a member of Teratoma, a group of curators, critics,
and anthropologists based in Mexico City, and is a visiting professor at Bard College’s
Center for Curatorial Studies.
In 2002 Medina was appointed associate curator of Latin American art at Tate Modern,
following his tenure as curator of contemporary art at the Museo Carrillo Gil in Mexico
City. He is the author of Graciela Iturbide (Phaidon Press, 2001) and has written
numerous articles for scholarly and popular periodicals, including Flash Art and
Third Text. He is a regular contributor to Mexico City’s Reforma newspaper.
Rirkrit Tiravanija
Rirkrit Tiravanija was born in Buenos Aires, studied in Canada and the United States,
and now lives and works in Bangkok, Berlin, and New York, where he teaches at Columbia
University. An artist best known for installations that invite the public to interact
socially in museum or gallery environments, Tiravanija has exhibited his work at the
Venice Biennale (1999), the Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art (1998), Site Santa Fe
(1997), the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1997), the Kunstverein in Hamburg, Germany
(1996), and the 1995 Carnegie International, to name but a few from an extensive list
of invitational, group, and one-person shows in Asia, Europe, and North America.
Tiravanija’s work is represented in the permanent collection of Carnegie Museum of
Art, Pittsburgh.
Co-curators
The Lee Bontecou section of the show was co-curated by Elizabeth A.T. Smith, the
James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Her
recent MCA exhibitions and publications include: Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective (2003,
with Ann Philbin); Donald Moffett: What Barbara Jordan Wore (2002); and Matta in
America: Paintings and Drawings of the 1940s (2001). Formerly curator at the Museum
of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Smith has organized numerous exhibitions there,
including The Architecture of R. M. Schindler (2001); At the End of the Century: One
Hundred Years of Architecture (1998); Cindy Sherman: Retrospective (1997); Urban
Revisions: Current Projects for the Public Realm (1994); and Blueprints for Modern
Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses (1989).
Smith is the co-editor of Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective (Abrams, 2003) and author of
Case Study Houses: The Complete CSH Program (Taschen, 2002) and Techno Architecture
(Thames & Hudson, 2000).
The Mangelos section of the exhibition was co-curated by Branka Stipancic, an independent
curator and critic based in Zagreb, Croatia. In 2003, she was the organizing curator for
a retrospective exhibition on Mangelos at the Fundação de Serralves, Museu de Arte
Contemporânea, Porto, traveling in 2004 to Neue Galerie, Graz, Fundació Antoni Tàpies,
Barcelona, and Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel. Recently Stipanciccwas co-curator of
The Baltic Times, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb (2001), Chinese Whispers, apexart,
New York (2000), Aspects/Positions, Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna
(1999), and The Future Is Now, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb (1999).
She was curator at the Museum of Contemporary, Zagreb, from 1983 to 1993, and also
served as director of Soros Center for Contemporary Art from 1993 to 1996. She is the
author of Mangelos nos. 1 to 9 1/2 (Fundação de Serralves, Museu de Arte Contemporânea,
Porto, 2003) and Connections—Contemporary Artists from Australia (HDLU, Zagreb, 2002).
