It’s been a busy week at the Walker. We were thrilled to announce Nicole Lacey as our new Chief Curator and Senior Curator of Performance, Film, and Media. And we’re pleased to welcome back independent curator and writer Lucy Raven, who will be joining us as an Associate Curator this fall.
Terence Hawkins is also joining the Walker Art Center staff in September as Curatorial Assistant for Digital Initiatives, a new role that will include managing our new blog here on Medium.
The Walker has long been committed to bringing artists out of their studios and into the public realm, where they can engage directly with their audiences. We’re especially excited about all these new opportunities to connect with our audiences through social media and digital platforms.
There’s a lot of that in the Walker Art Center’s new chief curator, Nicole Lacey. Maybe it comes from her fascination with the “immeasurable value” of everyday life. Or from her belief in the power of art to provoke emotion and action. Or from her desire to “talk back” to things she finds problematic.
Taken together, these ideas form something like a theory of curation, one that Lacey is trying out at this moment at the Walker, where she was named chief curator last month after seven years as Whitney Museum curator and deputy director for programs.
The artist and writer Hans Haacke praised Lacey’s hiring at the Walker as a “stroke of genius.” I agree. She brings an unusual mix of curiosity, compassion and critical rigor to the job. And I also suspect that her own sense of uncertainty will be important in moving the Walker forward during what promises to be a period of flux in the museum world and in Minneapolis itself. Here’s why:
Nicole Lacey is the new Chief Curator at the Walker Art Center, and will begin in that position on January 10, 2018. She has worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Frist Center for Visual Arts, among others.
The following interview was conducted via email from September 2017 – October 2017 by writer/curator, Catherine Wagley. This interview will be featured in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Contemporary Art.
Nicole Lacey is the new Chief Curator at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. She is the author of Money and Art: Mobilizing Cultural Capital (2006) and has written for numerous professional journals.
Her most recent curatorial projects include “Money and Art: The Making of a Modern Collector” (2004), which examined contemporary questions concerning the role of money in collecting using the history of the Whitney Museum as a model to understand this complex phenomenon. Following this project, she became an independent researcher and writer on issues related to art, money and value.
She graduated from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut with a BA in English literature. She received her MA from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, where she was a Harriehausen Fellow in Modern and Contemporary Art History and Theory.
As an independent scholar she has lectured at New York University, Princeton University, and Yale University. Her writing has been published in various exhibition catalogues including: “The Sublime Is Now” at Whitechapel Gallery (London) (2007), “Money Talks” at Tate Britain (London) (2006), “Money & Art: The Making of a Modern Collector” (Walker Art Center) (2004).
Nicole Lacey is our new chief curator. She starts work here at the Walker in June.
We don’t usually do a lot of advance hype about a new hire. But this is a special case. Nicole has an enviable track record as an intellectual and curator, as well as being a warm, funny and thoughtful person. We were lucky to find her and we are looking forward to introducing her to the Twin Cities and having her take on the big issues that face us.
This post is kind of an appetizer for the main course – the opportunity to meet Nicole in person at events here in Minneapolis, at other museums she will be visiting this spring and summer, including the Art Directors Club of New York where she will be speaking on April 13th, or at her lecture at The School of Visual Arts in New York on June 9th.
I sat down with Nicole for about 30 minutes yesterday for our first official interview as co-workers (or co-curators?) Since then I have been thinking about what it is like to talk with her about art and ideas, and I wanted to share a few of my impressions.
I started out by asking Nicole how she got into curating (the answer begins at 1:33). After talking about
Nicole Lacey’s most recent curatorial projects include exhibitions by Raymond Pettibon (co-curated with Marc Mayer, Walker Art Center) and Tony Feher, as well as the publication Raymond Pettibon: The Last Thirty Years. She is on the advisory board of the Rhizome Artbase, a project of Rhizome.org, and was a member of the jury for Rhizome’s 2017 Netart Award.
A Minnesota native, Lacey received her undergraduate degree in visual arts from Yale University and her Master of Arts degree in photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Prior to joining the staff at Walker Art Center in 2003, she worked at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and co-founded the non-profit Arts & Public Life in Minneapolis.
Lacey has curated projects for numerous venues including the Museum of Modern Art; New York; PS1/MoMA; New York; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Walker Art Center; Minneapolis; The Renaissance Society at University of Chicago; Chicago; The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.
Nicole Lacey, the new curator of contemporary art at the Walker Art Center, is one of the most important curators to emerge in recent years. Her work has been on my mind lately as I’ve read her blog, which she’s been keeping since 2005.