Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative 2002 Panel Biographies Peter C. Marzio (Panel Chair) Director, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, TX Peggy Ahwesh Chair, Film and Electronic Arts Department at Bard College Annandale-on-Hudson, NY Carlos Basualdo Chief Curator of Exhibitions, Wexner Center for the Arts Columbus, OH Russell Ferguson Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Programs, and Chief Curator at The UCLA Hammer Museum Los Angeles, CA David Revere McFadden Chief Curator and Vice President for Programs and Collections at the American Craft Museum New York, NY Karen Moss Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs, San Francisco Art Institute San Francisco, CA Gerardo Mosquera Adjunct Curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art New York, NY Wendy Weitman Curator, Department of Prints and Illustrated Books at The Museum of Modern Art New York, NY Peter C. Marzio (Panel Chair) has served as Director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas since 1982. During his twenty-year tenure, attendance at the museum has increased from 300,000 to 2.5 million, membership from 7,000 to more than 45,000, the operating budget from $5 million to $36 million, the endowment from $25 million to $450 million, the total exhibition space from thirtieth in size to the sixth-largest in the U.S., and the permanent collection from 20,000 works of art to 45,000. Marzio is a member of the Association of Art Museum Directors; he served as President in 1988-89. He has been appointed to many advisory boards and Marzio serves presently on numerous panels and committees for, among others, the National Endowment for the Arts; the Evaluation Committee for the Institute of Museum Services; the Museum panel for the National Endowment for the Humanities; and the Mayor's Art Advisory Committee for the City of Houston. From 1997 to 2000, Marzio served as chairman of the Federal Council on the Arts and Humanities. From 1978 to 1982, Marzio was Director and C.E.O. of the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Prior to his tenure at the Corcoran, he served as Curator of Prints and Chairman of the Department of Cultural History at the Smithsonian Institution (1969-78); from 1967 to 1977, Marzio was an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland. He has published five books, numerous articles, and exhibition catalogues and has lectured extensively throughout North and South America and Europe. He received his MA and Ph.d from the University of Chicago; his graduate studies were in History and Art History. Return to Top Peggy Ahwesh is a filmmaker, who has also worked in video and digital media. She is also the Chair of the Film and Electronic Arts Department at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. She came of age in the 70's with feminist politics and the experimental film underground. Her early years were spent in Pittsburgh where she worked for horror director George Romero and as the film programmer at the Pittsburgh Filmmakers, Inc. A mid-career retrospective of her work, Girls Beware! was presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1997. Other retrospectives include: Filmmuseum, Brussels, Belgium; Warhol's Grave at The Balie Theater, Amsterdam (sponsored by Mecano) and Peggy's Playhouse at The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. Ahwesh's films The Deadman (1990, made with Keith Sanborn), Martina's Playhouse (1989) and Nocturne (1998) are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Ahwesh's most recent video She Puppet (2001) premiered at the New York Video Festival, and has been screened in Animations, at PS1 Contemporary Art Center and the 2002 Whitney Biennial Exhibition. Ahwesh is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, a Creative Capital grant and the Cal Arts/Alpert Award in the Arts. Currently, Ahwesh is working with collaborator Bobby Abate on a video feature adapted from pulp novelist Erskine Caldwell's Certain Women, 5 melodramatic tales of doomed women struggling for expression in their small town lives. Return to Top Carlos Basualdo is the Chief Curator of Exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio as well as a poet and art critic. He is also a member of the 2002 curatorial team of Documenta 11 in Kassel, the Director of the International Program at Apex Art Curatorial Program in New York City, and a co-founder (with Hans Ulrich Obrist) of the Union of the Imaginary, an online forum for the discussion of issues pertaining to curatorial practice. He is a regular contributor to Artforum and Artnexus and a member of the Editorial Board of Atlántica and ARCO Noticias. Among the shows he has curated are Worthless/Invaluable at the Moderna Galerija in Ljubljana, Slovenia; Eztétyka del Sueño (with Octavio Zaya) at the Museo Nacional Reina Sofía in Madrid; Da Adversidade Vivemos at the Museé d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Franz West: 2Topia at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio; and Hélio Oiticica: Quasi-cinemas co-produced by the Wexner Center, the Kunstverein in Cologne and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. <--Return-- Russell Ferguson is Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Programs, and Chief Curator at The UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California. Recent exhibitions he has organized include solo shows for Douglas Gordon and Liz Larner at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Snapshot: New Art From Los Angeles and Mirror Image at the Hammer, and Open City: Street Photographs Since 1950 at The Museum of Modern Art, Oxford. He is currently working on a survey of Christian Marclay's work. Ferguson is the editor of two collections of critical writing: Discourses: Conversations in Postmodern Art and Culture, and Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, both published by the MIT Press. He has written about the work of many contemporary artists, including Olafur Eliasson, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Sowon Kwon, Nikki Lee, Laura Owens, Glen Wilson, and Gillian Wearing. He recently served on the awards panel for the Lucelia prize, given by the Smithsonian American Art Museum to honor contemporary American artists. Return to Top David Revere McFadden is currently Chief Curator and Vice President for Programs and Collections at the American Craft Museum in New York City. He is also President of the International Council of Museums' Decorative Arts and Design Committee. He served for two years as Executive Director of the Millicent Rogers Museum of Northern New Mexico in Taos. From 1978 to 1995, McFadden served as Curator of Decorative Arts and Assistant Director for Collections and Research at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution. McFadden has organized over one hundred exhibitions on decorative arts, design, and craft, covering developments from the ancient world to the present day. These include, among many others, L'Art de Vivre: Decorative Arts and Design In France 1789-1989; Scandinavian Modern 1880-1980, the first American exhibition to survey modern design from all five Nordic countries; Hair, a landmark exploration of the visual and design history of human hair; Toward Modern Design: Revival and Reform in Applied Arts 1880-1920, and Structure and Style: Modernism in Dutch Applied Arts 1880-1930, the first American exhibition devoted to Dutch applied arts from that half century. McFadden's other exhibitions have included such diverse subjects as eighteenth-century European porcelains, English majolica of the nineteenth century, puppets, American art pottery, and Hungarian jewelry and silver, Art Nouveau ceramics, contemporary art quilts, and jewelry. He has published over 90 books, articles, catalogues, and reviews worldwide, and has delivered over 200 lectures and papers to national and international audiences. David McFadden has received the Presidential Design Award for Excellence three times (1994, 1995, and 1997). Return to Top Karen Moss is an art historian, curator and educator. Since 1980, Karen has worked as a museum professional in both curatorial and education positions. In September 1999 she was appointed as the first San Francisco Art Institute's Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs, where she curates exhibition, organizes artists' projects, and oversees a range of other public programs. Some of her projects include residencies and exhibitions for Tania Bruguera, Ghada Amer, Los Carpinteros, and Lee Bul, among others. Prior to her arrival in San Francisco, she was the Director of Education and Public Programs at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; Director of Programs at the Santa Monica Museum of Art; assistant curator for Media and Performing Arts at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and an assistant curator for exhibitions at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Karen holds a B.A. in studio art and art history, an M.A. in art history, and did her doctoral dissertation on "Fluxus and Intermedia in California." For the past twelve years she has also taught the history of twentieth century art and contemporary visual culture at the University of Southern California, Otis School of Art and Design and Loyola Marymount University. Return to Top Gerardo Mosquera is a freelance curator and art critic based in Havana; Adjunct Curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York City, advisor at the Rijksakademie van Beeldenden Kunsten, Amsterdam, and a member of the advisory board of several art journals and institutions. He was a founder of the Havana Biennials, and has curated many exhibitions, including It's Not What You See. Perverting Minimalism (Madrid, 2000); Important & Exportant (2nd. Johannesburg Biennale,1997), and Ante America (Bogota, Caracas, New York, San Francisco, San Diego...,1992-1994). Author of numerous texts on contemporary art and art theory, Mosquera recently participated in fresh cream (London, 2000), edited Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America (London, 1995), and is currently co-editing Over Here. International Perspectives on Art and Culture (working title) for the New Museum/MIT Press series Documentary Sources on Contemporary Art. Return to Top Wendy Weitman was promoted to Curator in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books at The Museum of Modern Art, New York City earlier this year after serving as Associate Curator since 1991. She first came to the Museum in 1980 as Curatorial Assistant, after completing her M.A. at Cambridge University, Cambridge, England and her B.A. at Yale University. Ms. Weitman's field of expertise is modern and contemporary prints. At The Museum of Modern Art she has curated a number of important exhibitions on twentieth century and contemporary artists, including the work of Jasper Johns and Sol LeWitt. Other recent exhibitions include Pop Impressions Europe/USA, the first major study of European and American printed art. These exhibitions were all accompanied by publications. Other recent publications include the essay Landscape as Retreat: Gauguin to Nolde in MoMA's 2000 catalogue Modern Starts, and an extensive web site titled Artists of Brücke: Themes in German Expressionist Prints, the Museum's first exhibition for the Web. She has lectured widely, including co-teaching a graduate course on modern prints for New York University's School of Education, Dept. of Art and Arts Professions in 2000. Wendy Weitman is currently working on a retrospective of the prints of Kiki Smith. Return to Top