Mentor & Residency Hosts 2009

Valerie Cassel Oliver, Curator, Contemporary Art Museum, Houston
MENTOR: Madeleine Grynsztejn, Pritzker Director, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
RESIDENCY: Olga Viso, Director, Walker Art Center

Gloria Groom, David and Mary Winton Green Curator of 19th Century European Painting, Art Institute of Chicago
MENTOR: Deborah Card, President, Chicago Symphony Orchestra
RESIDENCY: Mimi Gardner Gates, Director, Seattle Art Museum

Maxwell Hearn, Douglas Dillon Curator, Department of Asian Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art
MENTOR: William M. Griswold, Director, The Morgan Library & Museum
RESIDENCY: James Cuno, Director, Art Institute of Chicago

Robin Held, Chief Curator and Director of Exhibitions and Collections, Frye Art Museum
MENTOR: Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director, Harvard Art Museums
RESIDENCY: Joseph Helfenstein, Director, The Menil Collection

Eik Kahng, Curator and Head of the Department of 18th and 19th Century Art, Walters Art Museum
MENTOR: Richard Armstrong, Director, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation
RESIDENCY: Kaywin Feldman, Director and President, Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Mary-Kay Lombino, Emily Hargroves Fisher '57 and Richard B. Fisher Chief Curator, The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College
MENTOR: Julián Zugazagoitia, Director and Chief Executive Officer, El Museo del Barrio
RESIDENCY: Adam Weinberg, Director, Whitney Museum of American Art

Kevin Salatino, Curator and Department Head, Prints and Drawings, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
MENTOR: Glenn D. Lowry, Director, Museum of Modern Art
RESIDENCY: Sir Nicholas Serota, Tate, England

Britt Salvesen, Director and Chief Curator, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
MENTOR: Ann Philbin, Director, Hammer Museum
RESIDENCY: Neal Benezra, Director, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Rochelle Steiner, Director, Public Art Fund
MENTOR: Michael Conforti, Director, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute
RESIDENCY: Michael Govan, Chief Executive Officer and Wallis Annenberg Director, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Matthew Welch, Assistant Director of Curatorial Affairs; Curator of Japanese and Korean Art, Minneapolis Institute of Arts
MENTOR: Michael E. Shapiro, Director, High Museum of Art
RESIDENCY: Maxwell L. Anderson, Director, Indianapolis Museum of Art

2009 Fellows

Valerie Cassel Oliver, Curator, Contemporary Art Museum, Houston
Valerie Cassel Oliver is Curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Prior to this position, she was director of the Visiting Artists Program, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, (1996-2000), and Program Specialist, The National Endowment for the Arts (1988-1995). In 2000, she was a co-curator of the Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

At the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Cassel Oliver has organized numerous solo and group exhibitions including Splat Boom Pow! The Influence of Cartoons in Contemporary Art (2003); Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970s; (2005) and Black Light/White Noise: Sound and Light in Contemporary Art (2007). Most recently she co-organized, Cinema Remixed and Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image with Dr. Andrea Barnwell-Brownlee, director, Spelman College Museum of Fine Arts in Atlanta. Her forthcoming project, a retrospective on the work of Benjamin Patterson, is schedule for 2010.

Gloria Groom, David and Mary Winton Green Curator of 19th Century European Painting, Art Institute of Chicago
Gloria Groom is the David and Mary Winton Green Curator of Nineteenth Century European Painting at the Art Institute of Chicago where she has responsibility for a collection of nearly 500 works. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin (1989) with a specialty in late 19th century French painting. During her three years in Paris she studied at the Université de la Sorbonne, UNESCO and Ecole du Louvre; the latter included an internship at the Musée Picasso. She came to the Art Institute in November 1984 as a research assistant for the popular exhibition A Day in the Country: Impressionism and the French Landscape (1984-1985). Two years later, she wrote the exhibition catalogue The Art of Paul Gauguin (1986-1987).

Her book, Edouard Vuillard: Painter-Decorator was published by Yale University Press in 1993. Since then she has been involved as both curator and catalogue author for exhibitions on important French artists including: Redon (1994), Caillebotte (1995), Renoir (1998), Vuillard and Bonnard (2001), Manet (2003), Seurat (2004), Toulouse-Lautrec (2005) and most recently, the exhibition on the art dealer Ambroise Vollard, entitled Cézanne to Picasso (2007). An internationally acclaimed author, curator, and lecturer, she is also on the Woman's Board of the Alliance Francaise, a commissioner for the Public Arts Council (Oak Park) and has for nine years been involved with PADS (Public Action to Deliver Shelter). In 2005 she was bestowed the title Chevalier des arts et letters by the French government.

Maxwell K. Hearn, Douglas Dillon Curator, Department of Asian Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
During his more than thirty years with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Maxwell K. (Mike) Hearn, Douglas Dillon Curator in the Department of Asian Art, has helped oversee the expansion of the museum's collection of Chinese art as well as major additions to the Museum's permanent exhibition spaces, including the Astor Chinese Garden Court and Douglas Dillon Galleries (1981), and the renovated and expanded galleries for Chinese Painting and Calligraphy (1997). He has curated or contributed to over fifty special exhibitions and installations including The Arts of Ancient China (1973), The Great Bronze Age of China (1980), Splendors of Imperial China: Treasures from the National Palace Museum, Taipei (1996), Along the Riverbank: Chinese Paintings from the C. C. Wang Family Collection (1999), How to Read Chinese Paintings (2008) and Landscapes Clear and Radiant: The Art of Wang Hui (1632-1717) (2008). In addition to his numerous publications, Hearn has taught graduate and undergraduate seminars at Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.

Robin Held, Chief Curator and Director of Exhibitions and Collections, Frye Art Museum, Seattle
Robin Held is currently Chief Curator and Director of Exhibitions and Collections at the Frye Art Museum, Seattle, where her dual mandate is to revitalize the Museum's collection of nineteenth-century German art and to increase its commitment to contemporary art. She has curated more than 100 exhibitions, including Empire (2008), Dario Robleto: Heaven is Being a Memory to Others (2008), Hug: Recent Art by Patricia Piccinini (2007), Swallow Harder: Selections from the Collection of Ben and Aileen Krohn (2006), and The Retrofuturistic Universe of NSK (2005). Prior to joining the Frye in 2004, Held was associate curator at the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington. Among her accomplishments there were the traveling exhibitions Hershmanlandia: The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson, 1965 - 2005 (2005), and Gene(sis): Contemporary Art Explores Human Genomics (2002). The latter was the first art museum exhibition to be registered with the National Institutes of Health, providing a new museum model for the save exhibition of life forms created by artists. Held has published widely on art in Eastern Europe, performance art and its relation to documentation, projected art, and biological art in an age of bioterrorism. She was a 2003 Getty Grant Program Curatorial Research Fellow for Hershmanlandia and a Goethe-Institute Visiting Scholar, Munich, Germany, 2006.
Photo by Adam L. Weintraub

Eik Kahng, Curator and Head of the Department of 18th and 19th Century Art, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore
Eik Kahng was promoted to head of the department of 18th and 19th century art at the Walters Art Museum last year. Before coming to the Walters, she was the assistant curator of European art at the Dallas Museum of Art from 1997 to 2001. Her earlier curatorial experience included stints at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC and the Kimball Art Museum.

Kahng graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1985 and received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkley. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and research awards, and has published and lectured widely with a particular emphasis on 18th and 19th century French painting and its critical reception. She is also an adjunct faculty member in the art history department at Johns Hopkins University.

Of the many exhibitions Kahng has curated, the most recent is the critically acclaimed Déjà Vu? Revealing Repetition in French Masterpieces (2007-2008). Dr. Kahng was also the organizing curator of Anne Vallayer-Coster: Painter to the Court of Marie-Antoinette (2002-2003).

Mary-Kay Lombino, The Emily Hargroves Fisher '57 and Richard B. Fisher Chief Curator, The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College
Since 2005 Mary-Kay Lombino has served as The Emily Hargroves Fisher '57 and Richard B. Fisher Curator at The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College where she oversees the contemporary art and photography collections, exhibitions, and publications. Prior to joining the staff at Vassar she served as Curator of Exhibitions at the University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach for six years and Assistant Curator at UCLA Hammer Museum for five years.

Her exhibitions include Utopian Mirage: Social Metaphors in Contemporary Photography and Film (2007); Off the Shelf: New Forms in Contemporary Artists' Books (2006); Candida Höfer: The Architecture of Absence (2005); UnNaturally (2003), By Hand: Pattern Precision, and Repetition in Contemporary Drawing (2001). She has also organized solo shows for numerous artists including Phil Collins, Mungo Thomson, Ken Price, Euan Macdonald, and Alice Könitz. Bob Knox: Non-Fiction Paintings, an exhibition Ms. Lombino co-curated, was voted First Place for the Best Exhibition of an Emerging or Under-known Artist by the International Art Critics Association in 2003. That same year, Ms. Lombino was selected by The Fund for U.S. Artists at International Exhibitions to organize an exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist Mungo Thomson to represent the United States in the Cuenca Bienal, a major international exhibition that took place in Ecuador in Spring 2004.

She was one of ten 2005-2006 recipients of the Getty Curatorial Research Fellowship. Ms. Lombino received a B.A. in Art History from University of Richmond, Virginia and an M.A. in Art History and Museum Studies from University of Southern California.

Kevin Salatino, Curator and Department Head, Prints and Drawings, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Kevin Salatino is Head of the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He joined the staff of LACMA in 2000, after a nine-year tenure as Curator of Graphic Arts at the Getty Research Institute. He has published and lectured widely in his areas of expertise, and has curated numerous exhibitions, including Picasso's Greatest Print: The Minotauromachy in all its States, the Prints of Ed Ruscha, and Van Gogh to Picasso: 19th and 20th Century French Master Drawings from LACMA. His book, Incendiary Art: The Representation of Fireworks in Early Modern Europe, will soon appear in a French edition. He is currently organizing the exhibition, Flowers of Evil: The Fantastic and Grotesque in French Art, 1850-1900, The Surrealist Drawing, and Monet/Lichtenstein: Rouen Cathedral, and is writing a book about the erotic drawings of Henry Fuseli. He received his A.B. from Columbia University and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and has taught at Middlebury College.

Britt Salvesen, Director and Chief Curator, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona
Britt Salvesen is director and chief curator at the Center for Creative Photography (CCP), University of Arizona, having been curator there since October 2004. She also serves as an adjunct professor in the University of Arizona's Art History Division. Previously, Salvesen was associate curator of prints, drawings, and photographs at the Milwaukee Art Museum (2002-04), and associate editor of scholarly publications at the Art Institute of Chicago (1994-2002). She received her MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art (1991) and her PhD from the University of Chicago (1997).

Among the exhibitions Salvesen has curated at CCP are Harry Callahan: The Photographer at Work (2006), and Making a Photograph: Iconic Images and Their Origins (2008). She has lectured and published on such topics as German Expressionism, Diane Arbus, photographic portfolios, and W. Eugene Smith. She is currently preparing an exhibition and catalogue on New Topographics, for which she was awarded a Bellagio Center scholarly residency in spring 2008 and which will travel to eight international venues in 2009-12.

Rochelle Steiner, Director, Public Art Fund, New York
Rochelle Steiner joined the Public Art Fund as Director in 2006 and has realized public art projects in New York with Chris Burden, Anish Kapoor, Damian Ortega, Sarah Morris, Sarah Sze, and other contemporary artists. Olafur Eliasson's "The New York City Waterfalls", commissioned and presented under her leadership, is among the most ambitious works of public art to date.

As Chief Curator at the Serpentine Gallery in London (2001-06), she curated one-person and group exhibitions with internationally acclaimed artists including Glenn Brown, John Currin, Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset, Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, Ellsworth Kelly, Takashi Murakami, Nick Relph & Oliver Payne, Gabriel Orozco, Cindy Sherman and Rirkrit Tiravanija among others. From 1996 to 2001, she was Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at Saint Louis Art Museum, where she organized the large-scale group exhibition "Wonderland" as well as the Museum's "Currents" contemporary exhibition series.

Rochelle Steiner earned PhD and MA degrees in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester, and a BA from Syracuse University in English and Advertising. Her essays and interviews with artists have appeared in numerous exhibition catalogues as well as such publications as Parkett and Modern Painters.

Matthew Welch, Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs; Curator of Japanese and Korean Art, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts
Matthew Welch is Assistant Director of Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Japanese and Korean Art at The Minneapolis Institute of Arts. He received his B.A. in English and Art History from Trinity University in San Antonio (1980) and an M.A. (1982) and Ph.D. (1995) in Asian Art History from the University of Kansas. He spent four years in the Department of Letters at Kyoto University, initially as a Fulbright Research Fellow. In his dissertation he examined the paintings and calligraphy of the Japanese Zen priest Toju Zenchu (alias Nantenbo) and their purpose within the monastic setting and lay community. Matthew has been at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts since 1990 and in that time he has generated eleven exhibitions, four of which have toured nationally. He has authored six books and has contributed essays to several other publications. In 1998, he expanded the display of Japanese art at the museum from two to nine galleries, and in 2006 he unveiled six additional galleries—making the Japanese art display at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts one of the largest in the country. In 1998, he also opened the first gallery devoted to Korean art at the museum. Since his appointment as Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs in February, 2008, he has revamped the museum's exhibition selection process and is presently examining the role of ancillary support groups to ensure that their activities are aligned with the museum's mission and that their contributions are recognized and celebrated.