Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative Panel Biographies 2000 Doreen Bolger (panel chair) Director, The Baltimore Museum of Art Baltimore, MD Valerie Cassel Director, Visiting Artists Program, School of the Art Institute of Chicago Chicago, IL Milan R. Hughston Chief of Library and Museum Archives, The Museum of Modern Art New York, NY Jeffrey Kipnis Curator of Architecture and Design, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University Columbus, OH Ann Philbin Director, UCLA Hammer Museum of Art Los Angeles, CA Renny Pritikin Chief Curator for all artistic programs, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts San Francisco, CA Kenneth R. Trapp Curator-in-Charge, The Renwick Gallery of the National Museum of American Art Washington, DC Olga Viso Associate Curator, Contemporary Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Washington, DC       Doreen Bolger (panel chair) was appointed the ninth Director of The Baltimore Museum of Art in February of 1998. At the BMA, she oversees an impressive permanent collection ranging from ancient mosaics to contemporary art and an annual operating budget of nearly $12 million. Since her tenure, Bolger has initiated a new direction for the museum through a strategic plan that emphasizes the importance of the permanent collection, exhibitions with strong artistic and educational components, and collaborative efforts with colleague institutions and the community. From 1994 to 1998, Bolger was Director of the RISD Museum at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. A specialist in 19th-century American art, Bolger was Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Amon Center Museum in Fort Worth, Texas from 1989 to 1994. She began her career at The Metropolitan Museum of art in New York where she was a member of the curatorial staff for 15 years in its American Wing and rose to become Curator of American Painting and Sculpture. Bolger publishes and curates in her field. Highlights of her curatorial career include the exhibitions: Thomas Eakins and "Swimming"; American Impressionism and Realism, The Painting of Modern Life: 1885-1915; and In Pursuit of Beauty: Americans and the Aesthetic Movement. She has repeatedly served as a panelist for the NEA and NEH and field reviewer for IMLS, and also serves on the boards of several organizations. She chaired an assessment team for the Art Museum, Princeton University, juried the 1998 Biennial Exhibition for the Howard County Arts Council, and curated an exhibition of women artists in Maryland for Government House, Annapolis. She has also lectured widely at colleges, community groups, and arts organizations. Bolger has received individual grants from the NEH and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She was an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art; and a Chester Dale Fellow at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She graduated from Bucknell University in 1971 and earned a Masters Degree in 1973 from the University of Delaware, Newark. In 1983, Bolger completed her doctorate degree at the Graduate Center of The City University of New York. Return to Top       Valerie Cassel is the Director of the Visiting Artists Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she directs all administrative and curatorial functions, and manages visiting artists residences. She is also an independent curator, and a member of the curatorial team that is organizing the Whitney Biennial 2000 for the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Cassel was a Program Specialist in Expansion Arts for the National Endowment for the Arts from 1988-95; has been an adjunct lecturer in the Department of Art at Howard University and Montgomery College, and from 1984-88 was the Program Coordinator for the Black Arts Alliance. At the Art Institute, Cassel has curated a number of innovative lecture series on topics such as "Curatorial Process and the Construction of Memory," "Sound Mining: Unearthing Extended Voices," "The Southern Comfort Mojo," "Art/Activism," "Lesbian Identity and the Landscape of Homophobia," "Jurassic Technology," "The Culture of Empire/Culture of Resistance," and "The Performative Object," among other programs. These programs showcased an enormous range of internationally recognized and highly regarded artists, curators, and critics. In 1997, she curated Fierce Cravings: Deconstructing Black Sexuality in Film and Video, a video installation and screening series in conjunction with the Sexing Myths exhibition at the Rymer Gallery. Cassel received her BA from The University of Texas, Austin,in 1987 and her MA in the History of Art from Howard University in 1993. Among other professional activities, she has also been a panelist for Arts Link in Washington D.C., and the National Association of Artists Organizations Conference, as well as a reviewer and nominee for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. Return to Top       Milan R. Hughston was a librarian at the Amon Carter Museum from 1979 to 1999, before assuming his current duties as Chief of Library and Museum Archives at The Museum of Modern Art in September 1999, During that time, he published comprehensive bibliographies in Museum publications, including Thomas Eakins (1996), the photography collection catalogue (1993), Eliot Porter (1989), and Laura Gilpin (1986). He has also been a frequent speaker on library topics and museum collections at professional conferences, including the Art Libraries Society of North America, College Art Association, Western History Association, and the American Association of Museums. He has also taken leadership roles in the Art Libraries Society of North America and its Texas chapter and served as Chair of the Art and Architecture Group of the Research Libraries Group. He was also chair of the Cultural District Library Consortium in 1997 and 1999, and authored an article entitled "Cyberart Versus the Old Masters: the Climate for Change in Art Museums," for Artlook 96, a CD-ROM publication. He moderated the panel "Books are Art Too: Promoting the Museum Library through Exhibitions," for ARLIS/NA, and was a panelist on a discussion of "Marketing Our Collections and Ourselves," for the American Library Association. A native of Clarksville, Texas he received his Bachelor of Journalism and Master of Library Science degrees from The University of Texas at Austin. In 1978/1979, he was the recipient of a Rotary International Scholarship and studied at the University of Manchester, England, post-graduate program in Art Gallery and Museum Studies. Return to Top       Jeffrey Kipnis is the Curator of Architecture and Design at the Wexner Center for the Arts and Professor of Architecture at The Ohio State University in Columbus. Kipnis was also the founder and first director of the Graduate Design Program of the Architectural Association of London. His publications include In the Manor of Nietzsche; Philip Johnson's Glass House, and Choral Works: The Eisenman/Derrida Collaboration, as well as numerous critical and theoretical essays for design periodicals such as Assemblage and El Croquis for whom he is senior staff critic. His own designs include premiated entries to the Yokohoma Port Competition and a PA Design award winning entry for a water-garden, executed in collaboration with R+U studio and a premiated entry with Greg Lynn for the New York Times time capsule competition. His urban designs includes the CBD masterplan for the Changliu District of Haikou, Hainan province, PRC and the Mixed Use development plan and design guidelines for the Chulalongkorn University of Bangkok, Thailand. He is currently curating four exhibitions: Imaginary Forces: Motion Picture Credits (motion graphics); Architectural drawings from the '80's; Scott Burton furniture, and a collaboration between the painter Fabian Marcaccio and the architect Greg Lynn. He is also writing a study of Frank Gehry's Peter Lewis House project. Kipnis received an MS from Georgia State University in 1982. Return to Top       Ann Philbin became the Director of the UCLA Hammer Museum of Art in Los Angeles in 1999. Prior to that, she was director of The Drawing Center in New York for nine years, and is widely credited with transforming it, as The New York Times noted, into "a vital center of a largely overlooked aspect of contemporary art." At The Drawing Center, Philbin organized landmark exhibitions such as Shadows of a Hand: the Drawings of Victor Hugo; Plains Indian Drawings: 1865-1935, and Pierced Hearts and True Love: A Century of Drawings for Tattoos. Under her direction, The Drawing Center introduced the work of hundreds of contemporary and emerging artists and presented major drawing exhibitions by Louise Bourgeois, Willem de Kooning and Richard Serra, among others. Prior to her position at The Drawing Center, Philbin organized large-scale public art exhibitions such as "The New Urban Landscape", an exhibition of 28 installations by renowned artists and architects including: Vito Acconci, Dennis Adams, Judith Barry, Dan Graham, Kawamata, Morphosis, and Jean Nouvel at the World Financial Center in New York City. She also organized Art Against AIDS: On the Road a nationwide exhibition (New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago) presented on billboards, bus shelters, television and print advertising to raise awareness of the AIDS crisis. She was also director of the Curt Marcus Gallery and, previously, the curator of The Ian Woodner Family Collection of old master drawings. Philbin serves on the Board of Directors for a variety of arts and non-profit organizations including the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School for Social Research; Etant Donne, a grant-making agency promoting French-American cultural exchange; Streb/Ringside dance company, and the HIV Law Project, New York City. New York's Village Voice has called Philbin "one of culture's brightest." Philbin has her BA in Art History from the University of New Hampshire, Durham, and her MA in Museum Studies/Arts Administration from New York University. Return to Top       Renny Pritikin was named Chief Curator for all artistic programs (film/video,visual art, performing arts, education) in January 1997 after serving as Director of the Visual Arts Program of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco since 1992. From 1979 to 1992 he served as Executive Director of New Langton Arts in San Francisco, an alternative space internationally renowned for its presentations of new visual art, interdisciplinary performance, video, literature and music. Pritikin has curated numerous exhibitions, and has authored catalogue essays and articles. Some of his projects include: Alan Rath: Robot Dance and Other Sculpture; Bay Area Now, a regional survey; Fred Tomaselli: The Urge to be Transported; Eight from South Africa, and The Art of Star Wars. Pritikin has been a frequent consultant for the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council, and was a founder of the National Association of Artists Organizations, and has also served on their Board of Directors. As a writer he received the 1989 McCarron Fellowship for art criticism, and has had two chapbooks of his poetry published, All These Trees (e.g. Press, Oakland, 1985) and Fourth Gear City Limits (Two Windows Press, Berkeley, 1976). In 1995 he received a United States Information Agency fellowship to tour and lecture in Japan and the Koret Israel Prize, a fellowship to visit Israel. In 1999 he travelled to Taiwan as a juror for the Ninth Annual International Print and Drawing Biennale at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. He holds a Masters degree in interdisciplinary art from California State University, San Francisco, and a BA from The New School for Social Research in New York. Return to Top       Kenneth R. Trapp is Curator-in-Charge of the Renwick Gallery of the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, a position he assumed in October 1995. Prior to his move to Washington, D.C., Trapp was Curator of Decorative Arts at the Oakland Museum of California from 1984 to 1995. Trapp holds a BS in industrial design from the University of Cincinnati, an MA in art history from Tulane University, and has completed doctoral work in art history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. At the Renwick, he has curated the recent Renwick Invitational: 5 Women in Craft, as well as The Renwick at 25; Collecting Ceramics; Glass! Glorious Glass!; and Recent Acquisitions of Furniture. He also organized such exhibitions as The Arts and Craft Movement in California: Living the Good Life; Intimate Appeal: The Figurative Art of Beatrice Wood, and Contemporary American and European Glass from the Saxe Collection. He is author of the title essay for Rookwood Pottery: The Glorious Gamble, published by the Cincinnati Art Museum in 1992. Trapp was project director, editor, and one of the authors for the book The Arts and Crafts Movement in California: Living the Good Life, published by Abbeville Press in 1993, for which he was awarded the Patricia and Phillip Frost Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Crafts. Trapp is currently working on a new biennial exhibition series, The Renwick Invitational, to begin in the year 2000 and an exhibition of U.S. Navy presentation silver to open in 2003. Return to Top       Olga Viso is the Associate Curator, Contemporary Art, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., where she has worked since 1995. Prior to coming to the Hirshhorn, she was an assistant curator at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, FL, and a curatorial assistant at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. She received her BA in Studio Art/Business from Rollins College in Florida, and her MA in the History of Art from Emory University in Atlanta. At the Hirshhorn, Viso has curated the exhibitions Regarding Beauty: A View of the Late Twentieth Century (with Neal Benezra); Carlos Alfonzo: A Survey, (originally guest curated for the Miami Art Museum); and Distemper: Dissonant Themes in the Art of the 1990s (also with Neal Benezra). She has also been the curator of shows for the following artists in the Hirshhorn's ongoing Directions series: Beverly Semmes, Toba Khedoori, and Sam Taylor-Wood. Upcoming projects include Directions shows with Brazilian sculptor Ernesto Neto, British sculptor Cathy de Monchaux, and a large-scale Ana Mendieta retrospective in 2003. In addition to publishing numerous catalogue essays, she has worked as an art reviewer for Art Paper; and has lectured extensively on contemporary art. Viso is on the board of School 33 Art Center in Baltimore, and the Washington Sculptor's Group, and she has also served as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts. Return to Top