First Associate Curator of Contemporary Art Named at the Fogg

Linda Norden has been named 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. Norden's title will be the Barbara Lee Associate Curator of Contemporary Art.

"Thanks to the generosity of our friends, especially Barbara Fish Lee, Paul Buttenweiser, 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 of the University Art Museums.

"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 School of Arts and Sciences, has been director of programs for the International Associates for Contemporary Art, with Rainer Crone at Columbia University, and was administrator and editor of the catalogue raisonné project for Robert Ryman's paintings and drawings. Norden also worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the Department of Objects Conservation and as the assistant conservator in the Department of Egyptian 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).

Norden has been an adviser on several exhibitions including Cy Twombly: "Treatise on the Veil," Andy Warhol: "Before and After" (Dia Foundation, N.Y.), and Success is a Job in New York (survey of Warhol's early work at the Parrish Art Museum, South Hampton, N.Y.). She was a consultant on Face Value: American Portraits (Parrish).

Norden will defend her Ph.D. dissertation, 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 Arts æ such 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, professor of the practice of studio arts, and Chris Killip, professor of visual and environmental studies, 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."