Lisa Phillips, Toby Devan Lewis Director, announced today that Vivian Crockett has been appointed Curator at the New Museum. She will begin full time at the New Museum on January 1, 2022.
Crockett joins the New Museum from the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) where she is The Nancy and Tim Hanley Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art. A specialist in Latinx art and art of the African diaspora, she curated the upcoming “Guadalupe Rosales: Drifting on a Memory” (October 1) and co-curated “Slip Zone: A New Look at Postwar Abstraction in the Americas and East Asia” (September 14) at the DMA. She also co-curated two permanent collection exhibitions and a presentation of Arthur Jafa: Love is the Message, The Message is Death, and curated a project exhibition with Jammie Holmes.
Prior to the DMA, Crockett was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the department of Media and Performance Art at The Museum of Modern Art, where she provided research and curatorial support for the exhibition “Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done” (2018) and co-organized the 2018 Museum Research Consortium.
While in New York, she worked independently with various arts organizations, including Visual AIDS, the Leslie-Lohman Museum, and Queer | Art, and served as a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art. From 2008 to 2011, she was a lead researcher for the collection review process in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Painting and Sculpture department, working with curator Sarah Roberts. Crockett also co-curated Visual AIDS’ 2017 Day With(out) Art: Alternate Endings, Radical Beginnings, a project supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and screened at over 120 national and international venues. She serves on the Graduate Committee of Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies and on the Advisory Board of Recess.
A graduate of Stanford University, Crockett is currently completing her PhD in art history at Columbia University, with a dissertation on the participatory and media-based work of Brazilian artists Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Pape. She has published scholarly papers in publications from institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Leslie-Lohman Museum, and MASP (Museu de Arte de São Paulo), among others.
Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director, states: “We are excited to welcome Vivian to the New Museum, as she brings a wealth of experience that will greatly enrich and energize our program. With her interests in African and Latinx diasporas, she strongly connects to the New Museum’s ongoing focus on international art and global dialogues, and her work around questions of gender and queer theory participates in the Museum’s long history of engagement with such themes. Just as importantly, she is passionate, engaged, and informed about the most recent developments in contemporary art. My colleagues Gary Carrion-Murayari and Margot Norton and I couldn’t think of a better partner as we continue to develop our program.”
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