Questions for Curators with Kristen Hileman and Liz Park, moderated by José Ruiz
Thursday, February 20 • 6-8pm
@ MICA Lazarus Center
FREE
Driven by questions from the community of emerging curators at MICA, this evening’s conversation brings together the perspectives of curators Kristen Hileman and Liz Park. As organizers of 2020 Grad Show 3, Hileman and Park invited MICA’s Curatorial Fellows and Curatorial Practice students to articulate the issues and topics that they are grappling with in their own developing practice. Drawing from their respective experience in museums and other contemporary art contexts, Hileman and Park will share thoughts, approaches, concrete examples of exhibition-making, and anecdotes from working with artists.
Liz Park is Curator of Exhibitions at University at Buffalo Art Galleries. She was most recently the associate curator of the 2018 Carnegie International at Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. She has curated exhibitions at a wide range of institutions including the Western Front in Vancouver, the Kitchen in New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, and Seoul Art Space Geumcheon. Her writing has been published by Afterall Online, Afterimage, ArtAsiaPacific, Performa Magazine, Fillip, Yishu: A Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Pluto Press, and Ryerson University Press, among others. Her topics of investigation have included representation of violence, invisibility, migration and moving images, burial and buried histories. She was a Helena Rubinstein Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2011-2012 and Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow at ICA Philadelphia in 2013-2015.
Kristen Hileman is an Independent Curator based in Baltimore and currently in residency at The Delaware Contemporary, Wilmington. She served as Head of The Baltimore Museum of Art’s Department of Contemporary Art from 2009 through 2019, where she oversaw the reinstallation of the museum’s renovated contemporary wing in 2012, initiated numerous acquisitions to diversify the collection, and presented exhibitions featuring an array of artists, among them the Guerrilla Girls, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley, Sarah Oppenheimer, Dario Robleto, Anri Sala, and Tomas Saraceno. Her most recent BMA projects included Meleko Mokgosi: Acts of Resistance, Lizzie Fitch / Ryan Trecartin, DIS: A Good Crisis and John Waters: Indecent Exposure, a large-scale retrospective of that influential cultural figure’s visual arts career. Throughout her time at the BMA, Hileman foreground artists with ties to Baltimore including Seth Adelsberger, Maren Hassinger, Sharon Hayes, Jimmy Joe Roche, Sterling Ruby, and Sara VanDerBeek. Jo Smail: Flying with Remnant Wing, her survey of the career of the distinguished painter and Maryland Institute College of Art professor, will open at the BMA in spring 2020.
From 2001 through 2009, Hileman worked at the Smithsonian Institution’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., where she organized the first full career retrospective of Anne Truitt, bringing new attention to the important DC-based abstractionist. At the Hirshhorn, Hileman also co-curated the international film and video exhibition The Cinema Effect: Realisms and led projects featuring John Baldessari, Cai Guo-Qiang, Cyprien Gaillard, Mario Garcia Torres, Oliver Herring, Jim Hodges, and Wolfgang Tillmans. She has taught at Johns Hopkins University, George Washington University, and the Corcoran College of Art and Design and is a frequent visiting critic and lecturer at colleges and universities.
