Special thanks to Kat Park of Rhona Hoffman Gallery for offering such fantastic coverage of the Chicago art scene last week. You can follow more of Kat’s projects here and here.
This week, Art21 is thrilled to welcome Paul Ha, Director of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (the Contemporary) and member of Art21’s Curatorial Advisory Council, to the blog. Under his leadership, the Contemporary has become a vibrant center for contemporary art and a prominent national venue. Exhibitions conceived during Ha’s tenure include I Remember Heaven: Jim Hodges and Andy Warhol, Laylah Ali: Painting and Drawings, Alexander Ross: Survey, Michael Lin, Yun-Fei Ji: The Empty City, William Pope.L, eRacism: electronica, Cindy Sherman: Working Girl, Polly Apfelbaum: Crazy Love and Love Crazy, and Slater Bradley: Contemporary Project Series. Prior to the Contemporary, Ha was the Deputy Director of Programs and External Affairs at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut. Before that he was the Executive Director (1996-2001) and Associate Director (1993-1996) of White Columns, New York’s oldest not-for-profit visual art space, where he curated more than 50 solo and group exhibitions, and where he exhibited artists such as Sarah Sze, Anna Gaskell, Christoph B√ºchel, A√Øda Ruilova, and Jessica Craig-Martin early in their careers, often presenting the artist’s first solo exhibition.
Ha began his career in the arts over twenty years ago at the Washington Project for the Arts in Washington, DC. Ha has lectured extensively on contemporary art, artists, the emerging art scene, and the importance of not-for profits. He has served on a wide array of panels, as a juror for numerous grant giving organizations, and has been a visiting critic and lecturer for many institutions, universities and art schools. Some of these include the National Endowment for the Arts, the Federal Advisory Committee on International Exhibitions, Pew Fellowships in the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, the Visual Arts Jury for the American Academy in Rome’s Rome Prize, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Yale University, Cranbrook Art Academy, and the Rhode Island School of Design. Ha served as a Visiting Lecturer at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and the Museum Studies program at the University of Missouri where he taught courses on Curatorial Studies and History of Alternative Spaces.
Stay tuned for Ha’s first post tomorrow.
