FOGG ART MUSEUM HIRES NEW ASSOCIATE CURATOR OF CONTEMPORARY ART, ESTABLISHES NEW DEPARTMENT AND EMBARKS ON MORE AGGRESSIVE MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART PROGRAM

June 18, 1998 addendum - This new position is titled: The Barbara Lee Associate Curator of Contemporary Art

For Immediate Release
June 10, 1998

Cambridge, Massachusetts-Linda Norden will be the first associate curator of contemporary art at the Fogg Art Museum. She will join Harry Cooper, the Fogg's first associate curator of modern art, hired last fall, in establishing the new Department of Modern and Contemporary Art. "Thanks to the generosity of our friends, especially Barbara Lee, Paul Buttenwieser, and Charlene Engelhard from the Boston area, our search for a contemporary curator has resulted in great success with the hiring of Linda Norden, said James Cuno, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director. "Linda is a very intelligent, creative, good humored, and energetic person. She will be an excellent colleague and we very much look forward to her joining us in the fall. Cooper and Norden will give modern and contemporary art strong advocates for an enhanced exhibition, publication, and acquisition program. And while we can boast of some real success in these areas over the past decades, these two dedicated specialists will lead us forward with real vigor."

Norden is currently assistant professor in art history at the Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture at Bard College in Hudson, N.Y. She has taught previously at the Columbia University's MFA Program, has been director of programs for the International Associates for Contemporary Art, with Rainer Crone at Columbia University, and was an administrator and editor of the catalogue raisonné project for Robert Ryman's paintings and drawings. Norden also worked in the Department of Objects Conservation and was the assistant to the conservator in the Department of Egyptian Art, both at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Norden has received numerous grants and awards, including Chester Dale and Andrew W. Mellon Fellowships in the Department of Twentieth Century Art at The Metropolitan, as well as Lane Cooper Whiting and the President's Fellowships at Columbia University. She has published essays on Cy Twombly in the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art's exhibition catalogue, Hand-Painted Pop: American Painting in Transition (Rizzoli, 1992), on Eva Hesse in the Yale University's exhibition catalogue, Eva Hesse: A Retrospective (Yale, 1992), and on Carel Balth, Francesco Clemente, and Roni Horn in the Dusseldorf Kunsthalle's exhibition catalogue, Similia/Dissimilia, for which she was co-curator with Rainer Crone (1987). She was a consultant on the exhibition Face Value: American Portraits (Parrish). Norden will defend her Ph.D. thesis, Cy Twombly's Narcissus, this summer at Columbia University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Department of Art History.

Cooper and Norden will oversee the Fogg's holdings of both European and American modern and contemporary paintings and sculpture. The collection contains important works by Picasso, Matisse, Constantin Brancusi, Joan Miró, Fernand Léger, Alexander Calder, Arshile Gorky, Ellsworth Kelly, Franz Kline, Morris Louis, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, Kenneth Noland, Mark Rothko, David Smith, and Frank Stella, among many others. The collection is particularly strong in post-1945 abstraction, and in sculpture from David Smith to Kiki Smith. To support their activities, both curators will be able to draw as well from the Fogg's expanding collection of modern and contemporary prints, drawings and photographs by such artists as Brice Marden, Susan Rothenberg, Richard Serra, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Ryman, Joel Shapiro, Eva Hesse, Nicholas Nixon, Nick Waplington, Yasumasa Morimura and Tina Barney among many others, and will be exploring acquisitions and programming in the field of such time-based arts as video and CD-ROM.

Norden will play a key role in future contemporary art projects at the Fogg and Harvard including further collaborations with the University's Carpenter Center for Visual Artsæsuch as the recent and highly successful program Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke: A Series of Conversations on the Use of Black Stereotypes in Contemporary Visual Practice presented in conjunction with the exhibition of a work by Kara Walker at the Carpenter Center. "Such collaborative projects will be a key feature of our future programs," Cuno said. "We work very closely with our colleagues at the Carpenter Center and with them, especially Ellen Phelan and Chris Killip, have brought such artists as Bruce Nauman, Susan Rothenburg, Kiki Smith, Joel Shapiro, Elizabeth Murray, and Vija Celmins to the local community. And we expect to do even more of this in the future.

"We are dedicated to collecting, exhibiting, and studying modern and contemporary art, as much as the art of other periods," Cuno explained. "Within just the last couple of years we have acquired important sculptures by Ellsworth Kelly and Kiki Smith, drawings by Eva Hesse, Brice Marden, and Ed Ruscha, a wall drawing by Sol LeWitt, prints by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Nancy Spero, and numerous conceptual and Fluxus artists, and of course the Busch-Reisinger Museum's extraordinary Joseph Beuys multiples collection, which numbers more than 600 works and which makes us the single most-important repository in the country of work by this seminal post-war German artist.

"We have been equally active exhibiting and publishing on contemporary art. Two years ago we presented some key early works by the minimalist sculptor, David Rabinowitch, and published the first monograph on his work. And just last year, with the Walker Art Center and Editions Schellmann, we published the English-language edition of the Joseph Beuys multiples catalogue raisonné. If you add to this the Nancy Spero installation in the Sacker Museum and the Günter Umberg installation in the Busch-Reisinger Museum, I think we have demonstrated our commitment to contemporary art. Still, there is a lot more we can do."

Indeed, although the Fogg's Department of Modern and Contemporary Art was established only last year, it has already presented two important exhibitions. As associate curator of modern art, Harry Cooper has curated the exhibitions "Drawing is another kind of language": Recent American Drawings from a New York Private Collection (at the Sackler last winter), which was organized by the Art Museums, and Brice Marden: Work Books (at the Fogg through September 6, 1998), which was co-organized by the Art Museums and the Kunstmuseum, Winterthur and the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich; both of these critically acclaimed exhibitions have extensive U.S. and European tours. Cooper also organized Abstraction, a small installation at the Fogg which supported spring classes in Harvard's newly named Department of the History of Art and Architecture, including "The Meanings of Abstraction," taught by Yve-Alain Bois, Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., Professor of Modern Art. In the spring Cooper presented a sold-out seminar series, Abstraction and Modernism, in conjunction with the installation which will be on view through September 9, 1998.

Cooper's first larger-scale installation will open at the Fogg in December. Tentatively titled American Abstract, the installation will comprise a select group of American abstract paintings and sculpture. Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Brice Marden, Robert Ryman, Agnes Martin, Jasper Johns, and Richard Anuszkiewicz will be represented, among others. In 1999 Cooper and his new colleague, Norden, will present the exhibition Ellsworth Kelly: The Early Drawings, 1948-1955 curated by Yve-Alain Bois. This pioneering exhibition, organized by the Art Museums and the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, will comprise approximately 220 drawings by Ellsworth Kelly from the 1948-1955 period. Many of these drawings, in which one sees Kelly working out his abstract aesthetic, have never been exhibited before. Yve-Alain Bois will also author a fully-illustrated catalogue. The exhibition will then travel to the Art Institute of Chicago, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and to Winterthur, Switzerand and Munich and Bonn in Germany.

Long-term projects for Cooper at the Art Museums include a Piet Mondrian exhibition. Cooper came to the Fogg last fall from the National Gallery, Washington, where he was the in-house curator of the major Piet Mondrian retrospective exhibited there. His Ph.D. dissertation was titled: Dialectics of Painting: Mondrian's Diamond Series, 1918-1944 and he edited the forthcoming English-language edition of the Mondrian catalogue raisonné written by Joop Joosten. He has lectured widely on Mondrian and jazz.

"Both Cooper and Norden are perfect for a teaching and research museum such as the Fogg, said Cuno, "and we are confident that they will continue in the Fogg's long line of distinguished curators." Aside from her own exhibition projects, Norden supervised twenty graduate student exhibitions during the course of her tenure at the Center for Curatorial Studies. Cooper has been a visiting lecturer at The Johns Hopkins University and a teaching fellow at Harvard. He will be teaching in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture in the spring of 1999, drawing on his installation at the Fogg.

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The Harvard University Art Museums comprise three museums (Busch-Reisinger Museum, Fogg Art Museum, Arthur M. Sackler Museum), all located on the Harvard University campus in Cambridge, MA, at the intersection of Quincy Street and Broadway, adjacent to Harvard Yard. The Art Museums are open Monday through Saturday, 10:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m., and Sunday 1:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m. Closed holidays. Admission is $5.00; $4.00 for senior citizens; $3.00 for students; free under 18, on Saturday mornings and, beginning July 1, on Wednesdays. For special tour reservations, please call (617) 496-8576. General tours are offered Monday through Friday from September through June. The Fogg tour is at 11:00 a.m.; the Busch-Reisinger tour is at 1:00 p.m.; and the Sackler is at 2:00 p.m.

The Harvard University Art Museums is supported in part by the Massachusetts Cultural Council. -end