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Whitney Museum of American Art
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December 2004

WHITNEY MUSEUM APPOINTS CARTER FOSTER CURATOR OF DRAWINGS
Mr. Foster Joins the Whitney in NewlyCreated Post

New York, NY—November 26, 2004 – Adam D. Weinberg, the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Alice Pratt Brown Director, today announced the appointment of Carter Foster as Curator of Drawings, a newly created position. Foster comes to the Whitney from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art where he serves as Curator and Co-chair of the Department of Prints and Drawings. He will assume his new post at the Whitney on January 31, 2005.

“We are thrilled that Carter has agreed to join our curatorial staff and oversee the drawings collection and exhibition program at the Whitney,” said Mr. Weinberg. “He brings a keen eye, great experience and enthusiasm to the Museum. This is a full time position we have long hoped to create, since stewardship of our drawings collection is such an important part of our mission."

Since its founding in 1977 by Whitney Trustee Jules Prown, Paul Mellon Professor of the Historyof Art at Yale University, the Drawings Committee of the Whitney has devoted considerable resources to the acquisition of one of the most comprehensive collections of twentieth and twenty-first century American drawingsin the world. Over the past ten years alone, holdings at the Whitney have grown exponentially. Major artists in the collection include Ed Ruscha, Arshile Gorky, Brice Marden, Claes Oldenburg,James Rosenquist, Jasper Johns, and Sol LeWitt.Prior to the appointment of Mr. Foster, adjunct curators including Paul Cummings, Klaus Kertess, and Janie C. Lee oversaw the collection.

A native of Atlanta, Georgia, Carter Foster graduated Magna Cum Laude with a degree in art history from the University of Georgia and earned his Master’s degree in 1991 from Brown University. After holding positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the New York Public Library, he joined the staff of the drawing department at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1996 and became its chief in 2002.  While there, he co-curated the first major exhibition of Cleveland’s drawing collection which toured to Houston and New York City among other places, and co-authored the accompanying catalogue.Mr. Foster also added important drawings to the collection, including works by Jasper Johns, Ed Ruscha, Charles Sheeler, Louise Bourgeois, and Ellsworth Kelly.  In 2003, he developed two major exhibitions, Drawing Modern: Works from the Agnes Gund Collection and Jasper Johns: Numbers. Mr. Foster joined the staff of the Los Angeles County Museum of Artin early 2004 as Curator and Co-chair of the Department of Prints and Drawings.

“I’ve been coming to the Whitney since my first visit to New York in my late teens,” said Mr. Foster.  “The variety and daring of its exhibitions combined with its seminal collection of American modernism have shaped my ideas about what a museum should be. I am absolutely thrilled to be joining the staff of an institution I have so long admired, in the city I love most in the world.”

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.

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