The Foundation To-Life, Inc. Arthur and Carol Kaufman Goldberg Curatorial Workshops are designed to bring curators of international stature to the Hunter campus to work with students in the MA program in Art History and the MFA program in Studio Art for an extended period of time. Previous Goldberg Curators have included Ann Goldstein of the Art Institute of Chicago; Hamza Walker of LAXArt in Los Angeles; Fabrice Stroun, an independent curator based in Switzerland; Valerie Cassel Oliver of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; Omar Kholeif of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Pablo Helguera of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Lynne Cooke of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The Foundation To-Life Curatorial Workshop program recognizes the curatorial interests and ambitions of Hunter students and the Hunter College Art Galleries’ longstanding commitment to exhibitions whose themes, theses, and checklists have been developed and honed by our students.
Koyo Kouoh – Fall 2019 
Koyo Kouoh is Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, South Africa, and the Founding Artistic Director of RAW Material Company in Dakar, Senegal. For the 57th edition of the Carnegie International in 2018, Kouoh organized Dig Where You Stand, an exhibition within the exhibition based on the Carnegie Museum of Art’s collection. With Rasha Salti, she co-curated Saving Bruce Lee: African and Arab Cinema in the Era of Soviet Cultural Diplomacy at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. Previously, she was the curator of 1:54 FORUM, the educational program of the Contemporary African Art Fair in London and New York, and served on the curatorial teams for documenta 12 (2007) and documenta 13 (2012). Kouoh was the curator of Still (the) Barbarians for the 37th EVA International, Ireland’s biennial in Limerick (2016); and has curated numerous exhibitions internationally. Her publications include Word!Word?Word! Issa Samb and the Undecipherable Form (RAW Material Company/OCA/Sternberg Press, 2013), the first monograph dedicated to the work of seminal Senegalese artist Issa Samb; Condition Report on Building Art Institutions in Africa, a collection of essays resulting from the eponymous symposium held in Dakar in January 2012; and Chronicle of a Revolt: Photographs of a Season of Protest (RAW Material Company and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2012). Besides a sustained theoretical, exhibition, and residency program at RAW Material Company, she maintains a critical curatorial and advisory activity and regularly takes part in juries and selection committees internationally. In March 2019, Koyo Kouoh was appointed Executive Director and Chief Curator of Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz Mocaa), in Cape Town, South Africa. She lives and works in Dakar, Cape Town, and Basel, and is consciously addicted to shoes, textiles and food.
Lynne Cooke – Fall 2018
Lynne Cooke is Senior Curator for Special Projects in Modern Art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. From 2012–14, she was Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. From 2008–12, she served as chief curator and deputy director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, and from 1991 to 2008, as Curator at Dia Art Foundation. In 1991, Cooke co-curated the Carnegie International, and has helmed numerous major shows since, including the 10th Biennale of Sydney (1996) and the traveling exhibition Rosemarie Trockel: Cosmos (2012). In 2018 she curated Outliers and American Vanguard Art, which explores the interface between mainstream and outlier artists in the United States in the twentieth century; the exhibition is on view at the National Gallery through May 18, 2018. Cooke has written widely on contemporary and self-taught art.
Pablo Helguera – Spring 2017
Born in Mexico City in 1971, Pablo Helguera has worked in a variety of contemporary art museums since the early 1990s, organizing almost a thousand public events in conjunction with nearly 100 exhibitions. He served as head of public programs in the Education Department of the Guggenheim Museum in New York from 1998 to 2005, and was appointed Director of Adult and Academic Programs at the Museum of Modern Art in 2007. In 2010, he was named pedagogical curator of the 8th Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
Helguera’s work as an educator in the museum intersects with his interests as an artist. Often taking the form of the lecture or engaging strategies of museum display, his art addresses questions of history, ethnography, language, and memory, reflecting on issues of interpretation, dialogue, and the role of contemporary culture in a global reality. The intersection of art and education is best exemplified in Helguera’s 2006 project, “The School of Panamerican Unrest,” a nomadic think-tank that physically crossed the continent by car from Anchorage, Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, making 40 stops in between. Covering almost 20,000 miles, it is considered one of the most extensive public art projects on record as well as a pioneering work for a new generation of socially engaged art.
Valerie Cassel Oliver – Spring 2016
Valerie Cassel Oliver is the senior curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, where she has organized numerous exhibitions including Splat Boom Pow! The Influence of Cartoons in Contemporary Art (2003); the acclaimed Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970 (2005); Black Light/White Noise: Sound and Light in Contemporary Art (2007); Cinema Remixed and Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image with Dr. Andrea Barnwell Brownlee (2009); Hand+Made: The Performative Impulse in Art and Craft; and a major retrospective on Benjamin Patterson entitled Born in the State of Flux/us (both 2010); as well as the survey, Donald Moffett: The Extravagant Vein (2011). In 2012, she mounted the project Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art and in 2014, a major survey of drawings by Houston-based and internationally recognized artist, Trenton Doyle Hancock entitled Trenton Doyle Hancock: Skin and Bones–20 Years of Drawing. Both exhibitions toured extensively. Most recently, Cassel Oliver mounted a survey of work by Jennie C. Jones entitled Compilation, on view at CAM Houston through March 2017.
In 2000, Cassel Oliver was one of six curators selected to organize the Biennial for the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In 2007, she received a Getty Curatorial Research Fellowship for initial research for the exhibition on Benjamin Patterson and was a fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership in 2009. In 2011, she was awarded the prestigious David C. Driskell Award for her scholarly excellence and contribution to the field of African American art and culture. Cassel Oliver’s two-week workshop at Hunter, entitled “Breaking Black: Strategies in Sustaining Dialogues About Black Artists,” examined concepts, issues, and debates central to the framing and presentation of black contemporary art in American museums.
Omar Kholeif – Fall 2016
Widely considered one of the world’s leading specialists of modern and contemporary art of the Middle East and North Africa as well as contemporary art and technology, Dr. Omar Kholeif is the Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. His curatorial work has focused on the intersection of politics, narrative and geography, for an increasingly hyperlinked world. Prior to his appointment at MCA Chicago, Kholeif was Curator at the Whitechapel Gallery, London; Senior Curator at Cornerhouse and HOME, Manchester; Senior Editor of Ibraaz Publishing; Head of Art and Technology at SPACE, London; Curator at FACT, Liverpool; Artistic Director, Arab British Centre, London, and founding director of the UK’s Arab Film Festival.
Kholeif has curated or co-curated over one hundred exhibitions, commissions, and special projects including the Cyprus Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, the Abraaj Group Art Prize, the Liverpool Biennial, and “Focus: Middle East, North Africa and the Mediterranean” at the Armory Show, New York. He is author or editor of over 20 books including You Are Here: Art After the Internet (2014), Moving Image (2015), The Rumors of the World: Re-thinking Trust in the Age of the Internet (2015), and Electronic Superhighway: From Experiments in Art and Technology to Art After the Internet (2016). His work has been published widely in a variety of venues, including The Guardian, Art Monthly, Wired, Mousse, frieze, and Camera Austria for which he writes a quarterly column. Kholeif is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Churchill Fellow, and a member of AICA, the International Association of Art Critics.
Fabrice Stroun – Fall 2015
Based in Geneva, Switzerland, Fabrice Stroun is an internationally known independent curator whose practice is focused on intensive and repeated collaborations with artists. He has worked multiple times with a core group of artists that includes Ericka Beckman, Josephine Pryde, Steven Parrino, Jim Shaw, Mai-Thu Perret, Rochelle Feinstein, and Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff. Over the past two decades, he has produced more than 50 solo and group exhibitions in a variety of public institutions across Europe, including Mamco: Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain and CAC: Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva; Le Magasin in Grenoble; Le Palais de Tokyo in Paris; and La Villa Médicis in Rome. From 1999 to 2001, he was the co-director of the Geneva-based art space Forde, with the artist Mai-Thu Perret, and in 2004, he co-founded Hard Hat, a gallery and art publisher, also based in Geneva. From 2011 to 2015, Stroun was the director and chief curator of Kunsthalle Bern. As a writer and an editor, he has collaborated on numerous monographic publications, and has contributed articles to periodicals such as Artforum, Frieze, Flash Art, and Parkett.
Hamza Walker – Spring 2015
Born in 1966 in New York City, Hamza Walker is the Director of Education and Associate Curator for the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. His exhibitions at the Renaissance Society include Teen Paranormal Romance (2014), Suicide Narcissus (2013), and Black Is, Black Ain’t (2008), which explored important shifts in the rhetoric of race. In December 2014, he was announced as co-curator of the Hammer Museum’s next Los Angeles biennial, Made in LA 2016.
Walker is the recipient of the 1999 Norton Curatorial Grant and the 2004 Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement, presented by the Menil Collection. In 2010, he was awarded the New Museum’s Ordway Prize; named for the naturalist, philanthropist, and arts patron Katherine Ordway, the prize acknowledges the contributions of a curator whose work has had significant impact on the field of contemporary art. In 2001, the New York Times named Walker one of the seven most influential curators in the country, noting that “a powerful exhibition depends on words as well as pictures, and Mr. Walker is recognized as one of the museum world’s most talented essayists, as well as for his storytelling approach to organizing shows.”
Walker has contributed reviews and art criticism to New Art Examiner, Art Muscle, Dialogue, Parkett, and Artforum, in addition to numerous catalogue essays on artists ranging from Giovanni Anselmo and Darren Almond to Thomas Hirschhorn and Heimo Zobernig. Prior to his work at the Renaissance Society, Walker was the Public Art Coordinator for the City of Chicago, Department of Cultural Affairs.
Ann Goldstein – Fall 2014
Ann Goldstein was Director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam from 2010 to 2013; prior to her appointment at the Stedelijk, she served as Senior Curator at MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, from 2001 to 2009, the culmination of a 26-year career there. In Los Angeles, Ms. Goldstein organized important one-person exhibitions of some of the most significant artists of the contemporary period, including Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Martin Kippenberger, Barbara Kruger, and Cady Noland. Ms. Goldstein is best known for a trio of large, carefully researched exhibitions she realized at MOCA, surveying the history of art since the 1960s: A Forest of Signs: Art in the Crisis of Representation (1989), A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958–1968 (2004), and 1965–1975: Reconsidering the Object of Art (1995–96). Described by Art in America as “forthright and strong-willed,” Goldstein was awarded the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence by the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in April 2012.