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Whitney Museum of American Art
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May 2004

WHITNEY MUSEUM ANNOUNCES THREE NEW CURATORIAL APPOINTMENTS

Donna De Salvo, Joan Simon and Elisabeth Sussman named to new positions as part of a new curatorial structure of the Whitney

New York, NY—May 19, 2004 – Adam D. Weinberg, the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Alice Pratt Brown Director, today announced the appointment of three new curators, part of a restructuring of the curatorial division of the Museum. The curators are Donna De Salvo, Joan Simon and Elisabeth Sussman.

“Elisabeth, Donna and Joan are three of the most astute and independent voices in an incredibly dynamic field,” said Mr. Weinberg. “Their passion, openness, and proven experience in working with artists will be critical assets. I believe they are the ideal curators to advance the Whitney as the leading advocate of 20th- and 21st-century American art, and further enhance our international presence.”

Ms. Simon and Ms. Sussman assume their posts July 1, 2004; Ms. De Salvo will work part-time over the summer and begin full-time in September. The new curators join Callie Angell, Barbara Haskell, Michael Hays, Henriette Huldisch, Chrissie Iles, David Kiehl, Dana Miller, Shamim Momin, Christiane Paul, Lawrence Rinder, Debra Singer and Sylvia Wolf in carrying forward the Whitney’s newly oriented mission.

“One of the hallmarks of 20th- and 21st-century art is its collaborative, intermedia, and interdisciplinary character,” says Weinberg. “While recognizing that there are specialized knowledge and techniques germane to a particular medium, a museum devoted to the art of the present should celebrate the integration of the arts as much as their distinctiveness. This outlook enables the Whitney to distinguish itself from other museums organized on a 19th-century chronological/media-based model. Accordingly, the museum’s curators will now have areas of expertise and specialty but are not confined to working in those areas alone. The Whitney’s curators will work collaboratively not only with other curators but with other program departments throughout the museum. They are now free to follow an idea wherever it may lead without regard to arbitrary chronological or media-based barriers.”

Donna De Salvo, the Whitney’s new Associate Director for Programs and Curator, Permanent Collection, is returning to the U.S. from Tate Modern in London, where she been a Senior Curator since February 2000. Since Tate Modern’s opening, Ms. De Salvo has been responsible for a wide range of curatorial projects there, serving on the committee responsible for the collection displays, advising on acquisitions of international modern and contemporary art, and organizing exhibitions on Giorgio Morandi, Andy Warhol, and one of the Turbine Hall commissions, The Unilever Series: Anish Kapoor. Over the years she has organized exhibitions of the work of Ray Johnson, Barbara Bloom, Gerhard Richter, John Chamberlain, and Cy Twombly among others. She is a noted scholar on the work of Andy Warhol and Pop Art and has curated the exhibitions: Hand-Painted Pop: American Art in Transition, as well as Success is a Job in New York: The Early Art and Business of Andy Warhol. Before joining Tate Modern, De Salvo served as Curator-at-Large at the Wexner Center for the Arts at the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, as Robert Lehman Curator at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York, as Adjunct Curator at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and as a curator at the Dia Art Foundation. She is a past recipient of the Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award from the College Art Association, and has worked with several curatorial studies programs, including those at Bard College and the Royal College of Art, London.

New York-based independent curator Elisabeth Sussman returns to the Whitney, where she was a curator from 1991 to 1998. Her Whitney exhibitions included Mike Kelley: Catholic Tastes (1993); the 1993 Biennial Exhibition; Nan Goldin: I’ll Be Your Mirror (1996), with David Armstrong; and Keith Haring (1997). For the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Ms. Sussman co-organized, with Renate Petzinger of the Museum Wiesbaden, a recent retrospective on the work of Eva Hesse. The exhibition received the International Art Critics Association First Prize for the best monographic exhibition outside of New York in 2001 and 2002. For SFMOMA, Ms. Sussman also organized, with Sandra Phillips, a Diane Arbus retrospective, currently on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The catalogue for the Arbus exhibition has received the 2004 Infinity Award for Publication from the International Center of Photography. Ms. Sussman was a Fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation at the Rockefeller Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy, in 1999. In 2003 she was a Scholar at the Getty Research Institute. She is the author of many publications, including Lisette Model (2001). Before coming to the Whitney, Ms. Sussman served as Interim Director (1991) and Deputy Director for Programs (1989-91) at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Also at the ICA, she was Chief Curator from 1982 to 1989, and Curator from 1976 to 1982. She has taught at M.I.T. and Tufts.

The Whitney’s new Curator-at-Large, Joan Simon is a writer, curator, editor, and arts administrator based in Paris, France, who has worked independently for museums, foundations and publishers in the United States and in Europe. A former managing editor of Art in America (1974-83), Ms. Simon has published extensively on contemporary art and is the author of Ann Hamilton (2002), as well as a monograph on painter Susan Rothenberg (1991). She has contributed to monographs on Gordon Matta-Clark and Jenny Holzer. Ms. Simon served as general editor of the exhibition catalogue and catalogue raisonné Bruce Nauman. Among the artists whose works she has researched over many years are Joan Jonas, Rosemarie Trockel, Susan Rothenberg, Ann Hamilton, Gordon Matta-Clark, Sheila Hicks, Fred Sandback, Jenny Holzer, Bruce Nauman, and William Wegman. She is currently organizing a comprehensive, critical Wegman retrospective for The Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts, which will open there April 2005 and then travel to The Brooklyn Museum, and other venues. The show’s accompanying monograph by Simon is to be published by Yale University Press. Ms. Simon is a Contributing Editor to Art in America. Her articles have also appeared in Art Press, Beaux Arts, Parkett, and other international journals. She is especially known for her in-depth interviews, which have been reprinted often and in translation, among them, Michael Asher, John Baldessari, Robert Irwin, Patrick Loughran, Agnes Martin, Issey Miyake, Elizabeth Murray, Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, Ken Price,  Susan Rothenberg, Fred Sandback, Niki de Saint-Phalle , Alexis Smith, and Kiki Smith. Ms. Simon is a graduate of Cornell University.

ABOUT THE WHITNEY
The Whitney Museum of American Art is the leading advocate of 20th- and 21st-century American art. Founded in 1930, the Museum is the preeminent collection of American art and includes the entire artistic estate of Edward Hopper, the largest public collection of works by Alexander Calder, Louise Nevelson, and Lucas Samaras, as well as significant works by Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Bruce Nauman, Georgia O’Keeffe, Claes Oldenburg, Kiki Smith, and Andy Warhol, among other artists. With its history of exhibiting the most promising and influential American artists and provoking intense critical and public debate, the Whitney’s signature show, the Biennial, has become a measure of the state of contemporary art in America today.