Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative Panel Biographies 2008 Jeremy Strick (Panel Chair) Director Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Rashida Bumbray Assistant Curator The Kitchen, New York City Jason T. Busch Curator of Decorative Arts Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA Siri Engberg Curator Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN Laura Hoptman Kraus Family Senior Curator New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York City Bill Horrigan Director, Media Arts Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH Nato Thompson Curator/Producer Creative Time Inc., New York City Panel Biographies Jeremy Strick (Panel Chair) joined the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, (MOCA) as Director in 1999, having served previously in curatorial positions at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Saint Louis Art Museum, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. As Director, Strick oversees exhibition, acquisition, and education programs, as well as all operations at MOCA’s three facilities. Recently hailed by the Los Angeles Times as “the nation’s most prominent contemporary art museum,” MOCA’s reputation has grown during Strick’s tenure through an ambitious series of ground-breaking thematic survey exhibitions as well as major monographic presentations of the defining artists of our time. The museum’s permanent collection of over 6,000 objects has expanded dramatically through the purchase of singular masterworks as well as the gift of major collections. MOCA’s membership, which tops 20,000 and is the largest of any contemporary museum in the nation, has grown by over 80% since Strick joined the museum. A native of Los Angeles, Strick graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and pursued doctoral studies at Harvard University. He has organized numerous exhibitions and published scholarly articles in the fields of modern and contemporary art, as well as nineteenth century European art. Return to Top Rashida Bumbray has been an Assistant Curator at The Kitchen, New York City, since September 2006. Previously, she enjoyed a five-and-a-half-year tenure at The Studio Museum in Harlem, first as Curatorial Assistant and then as the Exhibition Coordinator. She holds a B.A. from Oberlin College and is completing her M.A. in Africana Studies at New York University. During her tenure at the Studio Museum, she co-organized exhibitions such as Seeds and Roots: Selections from the Permanent Collection, 2004, co-curated with Thelma Golden, and Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction 1964-1980 with Kellie Jones, 2006. She is also the Co-founder and Curator of Studio Sound, the Studio Museum's lobby music installation which featured new works by Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR), Marc Cary, and Charlie Dark’s The Black Atlantic Project: a musical chain letter. She is also the co-founder of Hoofers’ House, the Museum's quarterly jam session for tap dancers, which is now also being co-produced by The Kitchen. At The Kitchen, she recently co-curated the exhibition Mai-Thu Perret: An Evening of the Book with Debra Singer and has organized several music events at The Kitchen, including new concert works by Pheroan akLaff, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Guillermo E. Brown, Min Xiao-Fen, and Burnt Sugar, The Arkestra Chamber. Return to Top Jason T. Busch is the Alan G. and Jane A. Lehman Curator of Decorative Arts and head of department at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Busch directs the renovation and reinstallation of the Ailsa Mellon Bruce wing and the Decorative Arts Study and Storage, as well as oversees the publication of the decorative arts collection highlights handbook. He was formerly Associate Curator of Architecture, Design, Decorative Arts, Craft & Sculpture, and Curator of the Grand Salon from the Hôtel Gaillard de La Bouëxière (Paris, c. 1735) at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, where he was also responsible for the installation of decorative arts coinciding with MIA’s expansion and renovation. Busch began his career as Assistant Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford. He has held fellowships and internships at the National Park Service, Historic Deerfield (Massachusetts), Colonial Williamsburg, and the Cincinnati Historical Society. He received his master’s degree in Early American Culture from the Winterthur Program at the University of Delaware. He also has actively contributed to scholarship on 18- and 19-century decorative arts, culminating in several exhibitions and publications, including Rococo: The Continuing Curve, 1720-2008 (Cooper Hewitt Museum, 2008); Currents of Change: Art and Life Along the Mississippi River, 1850 - 1861 (Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2004); and George Washington: In Profile (Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 1999). Return to Top Siri Engberg has been the Curator in the Visual Arts department at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, since 1990; she will be Curator of Prints and Editions there as of July 2008. At the Walker, she has organized exhibitions for the museum on artists including Claes Oldenburg, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Motherwell, Lorna Simpson, Edward Ruscha, Joan Mitchell, and Donald Judd. She has also curated thematic exhibitions for the Walker, such as The Home Show and Art Performs Life: Merce Cunningham/Meredith Monk/ Bill T. Jones. She has contributed to and authored a variety of publications and exhibition catalogues on contemporary art, and is the author of two catalogues raisonnés: one on the editions of Edward Ruscha, and the other on the prints of Robert Motherwell.  In 2005, she was part of the curatorial team that reinstalled the Walker’s permanent collection in its recent building expansion, designed by the Swiss architectural team of Herzog and de Meuron. Most recently, Engberg was curator of the Walker touring exhibitions, Chuck Close: Self-Portraits 1967-2005 (co-curated with Madeleine Grynsztejn) and Kiki Smith: A Gathering 1980-2005. She is currently working on an exhibition examining contemporary painting's relationship to photography as well as a catalogue raisonné on the prints of Chuck Close. She received her B.A. from Lawrence University, Wisconsin. Return to Top Laura Hoptman is the Kraus Family Senior Curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City. Previously, she was the Curator of Contemporary Art at Carnegie Museum of Art where she organized the 54th Carnegie International exhibition (2004-05), and oversaw the re-installation of the museum’s permanent collection in 2003. From 1995-2001, she was a curator of drawing at The Museum of Modern Art, organizing numerous exhibitions including Drawing Now: Eight Propositions (2002) and Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama (1998) and projects by Maurizio Cattelan, John Bock, Elizabeth Peyton, Luc Tuymans, John Currin and others. Most recently, she was part of the curatorial team that organized Unmonumental, a series of four exhibitions inaugurating the New Museum’s new facility on the Bowery in Manhattan. In addition to catalogues accompanying her exhibitions, Hoptman is the author of Yayoi Kusama (Phaidon Press, 2000) and the co-editor of Primary Documents, an anthology of writing about contemporary art in East and Central Europe from the 1950s to the present. She has written frequently for magazines in the U.S., Europe and Asia, such as Parkett, Flash Art, and others. She received her B.A. from Williams College and her M.A. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Return to Top Bill Horrigan has been Media Arts Director at the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University since the Center opened in 1989. The Media Arts department presents about 150 films and videos annually, and also operates the Center's Art & Technology facility, an Avid-based media center for ongoing artists’ residencies. Media Arts also programs The Box, a project space on monthly rotation. Among visiting artists brought to the Wexner by the department are Abbas Kiarostami, Olivier Assayas, Claire Denis, Julie Dash, Todd Haynes, Yvonne Rainer, Gus Van Sant, Guy Maddin, Philip Kaufman, Terence Davies, Isaac Julien, Sadie Benning, and dozens of others. Among many other gallery projects he has curated are Robert Beck: dust and Chris Marker: Staring Back (both 2007), William Kentridge: 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès (2006), Phil Collins: They Shoot Horses (2005), and Andy Warhol: Screen Tests (2003). He has also developed projects with Tom Kalin, Paper Tiger Television, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Helen DeMichiel, John Greyson, Steve Fagin, and Beth B, among others. From 1993 to 1997, he was coproducer of the PBS series, New Television, partnering first with WGBH/Boston and later with Connecticut Public Television. After completing his doctorate in film at Northwestern University in 1979, Horrigan worked at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, first in the film/video and then in the media department, where the PBS series Alive from Off Center was developed. He’s a frequent contributor to film and visual arts journals and catalogues, and is Adjunct Faculty in Ohio State University’s Film Studies Program. Most recently, he was a member of the three-person Advisory Team for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 2008 Biennial exhibition. Return to Top Nato Thompson is Curator at Creative Time, New York City, which presents and commissions innovative art in the public realm. His recent projects include Paul Chan’s: Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, and Mike Nelson’s A Psychic Vacuum. He is currently working on a multi-part project in 2008 titled Democracy in America: The National Campaign. In Fall 2008, ICI will tour his group exhibition Experimental Geography which focuses on the hybrid field of geography and aesthetic practice. Previous to Creative Time, Thompson was curator at MASS MoCA where he organized numerous exhibitions including Ahistoric Occasion: Artists Making History, Becoming Animal, and The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere. His writings on art, politics, and alternative cultural production have appeared in Tema Celeste, Art Journal, Freize, and the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. Thompson received the College Art Association Art Journal Award for Distinguished Writing in 2005. He advises several national and international arts organizations including Creative Capital, Art in General and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.  He is a graduate of UC Berkeley and received an M.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Return to Top