A Tribute to Barbara Rose

A curator of contemporary art responsible for conceptualizing and organizing dozens of exhibitions over the course of her career including Tania Candiani: Sounding Labor: Silent Bodies (2020), Unraveled: Challenging Textile Traditions (2016) (both at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati) and Staged Stories: 2009 Renwick Craft Invitational (Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., 2009). From 2004-2012 Bonansinga was founding director of Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for Visual Art at The University of Texas, El Paso where she curated many exhibitions, established an undergraduate minor in museum studies and taught courses in curatorial practice. Her experience there is the subject of her book Curating at the Edge: Artists Respond to the U.S./Mexico Border.

Art historian, curator, and critic Douglas Dreishpoon is currently Director of the Catalogue Raisonné project at the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation in New York City and Chief Curator Emeritus at the AKG Art Museum, Buffalo. In 2022, his anthology of sculptors’ writings, Modern Sculpture: Artists in Their Own Words, was published by University of California Press and his contributions to Helen Frankenthaler: Late Works, 1988–2009 were published by Radius Books. A Consulting Editor at the Rail, Dreishpoon holds a PhD from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Jack Flam is President and Chief Executive Officer of the Dedalus Foundation and distinguished Professor Emeritus of Art and Art History at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of numerous books, catalogues, and articles on various aspects of nineteenth and twentieth-century European and American art, and on African art. He has organized exhibitions in major European and American museums and has lectured extensively at museums and universities throughout the world. He is the editor of Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, which was published by the University of California Press in 1996.

One of the great innovators in postwar American painting. He emerged from the Washington, D.C. scene in the mid 1960s with works that elaborated upon and disrupted the ethos of Color School painting. A series of formal breakthroughs resulted in his canonical Drape paintings, which expanded upon the tenets of Abstract Expressionism in entirely new ways. Suspending stretcherless lengths of painted canvas from the walls or ceilings, Gilliam transformed his medium and the contexts in which it was viewed. As an African-American artist in the nation’s capital at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, this was not merely an aesthetic proposition; it was a way of defining art’s role in a society undergoing dramatic change.

Alison de Lima Greene is the Isabel Brown Wilson Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. A 2010 Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership, she has organized numerous exhibitions, and her recent projects have profiled Mark Rothko, Mike and Doug Starn, and Pipilotti Rist. Working closely with Harry Cooper, Kate Nesin, and Mark Godfrey, she co-curated Philip Guston Now, on view in Houston through January 16, 2023.

Director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Previously, he served as the Engelhard Chairman of the Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern and Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. During his tenure at The Metropolitan Museum, he has organized dozens of acclaimed exhibitions, accompanied by significant publications, many of which were mounted in collaboration with, and traveled to, major museums around the world. A number of these shows were among the best-attended exhibitions ever presented at the Metropolitan.

Critic and art historian Phyllis Tuchman teaches and writes about art, particularly sculpture. She has taught at Williams College, Hunter College, and the School of Visual Arts. She is an Editor-at-Large for the Brooklyn Rail.

Phong H. Bui is an artist, writer, independent curator, and Co-Founder and Publisher/Artistic Director of the Brooklyn Rail, Rail Editions, River Rail and Rail Curatorial Projects.