The Department of Art and Art History at The University of Texas at Austin is pleased to welcome Valerie Cassel Oliver and Hamza Walker for the 2020 Viewpoint Series. This program invites leading curators, critics and scholars of the contemporary art world for three separate visits to the UT Austin campus. Each visit lasts several days and is comprised of a public lecture and seminar, as well as private studio visits for current graduate students.
Lectures: Thursdays January 23, March 5 and April 2
Seminars: Fridays January 31, March 6, April 3
Valerie Cassel Oliver is the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Prior to her position at the VMFA, she was Senior Curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston where worked from 2000 - 2017. She has served as director of the Visiting Artist Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1995-2000) and a program specialist at the National Endowment for the Arts (1988-1995). In 2000 she was one of six curators selected to organize the Biennial for the Whitney Museum of American Art.
During her tenure at the CAMH, Cassel Oliver organized numerous exhibitions including the acclaimed Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970 (2005); Cinema Remixed & Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image Since 1970 with Dr. Andrea Barnwell Brownlee (2009); a major retrospective on Benjamin Patterson, Born in the State of Flux/us (2010) and Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art (2012). She has also mounted significant survey exhibitions for Benjamin Patterson, Donald Moffett, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Jennie C. Jones, Angel Otero and Annabeth Rosen.
Her 2018 debut exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts was a 50-year survey of work by Howardena Pindell entitled Howardena Pindell: What Remains to be Seen. The exhibition is co-organized with Naomi Beckwith, the Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and traveled through 2019. Most recently, Cassel Oliver organized the exhibition, Cosmologies from the Tree of Life that featured over thirty newly acquired works from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. She is currently developing the group exhibition, The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture and the Sonic Impulse, scheduled to open at the VMFA April, 2021.
Cassel Oliver is the recipient of a Getty Curatorial Research Fellowship (2007); the High Museum of Art’s David C. Driskell Award (2011); the Arthur and Carol Kaufman Goldberg Foundation-to-Life Fellowship at Hunter College (2016) and the James A. Porter Book Award from Howard University (2018). From 2016-17, she was a Senior Fellow in Curatorial Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Cassel Oliver holds a M.A. in art history from Howard University in Washington, D.C. and, B.S. in communications from the University of Texas at Austin.
Hamza Walker is the Director of LAXART, an independent nonprofit art space in Los Angeles. From 1994–2016, he was the Director of Education and Associate Curator at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, a non-collecting museum devoted to contemporary art. He recently curated Postcommodity: Some Reach While Others Clap (2020), the two person exhibition Outside/In (Phil Peters and Karen Reimer) (2019), Barbara Stauffacher Solomon: Relax Into the Invisible (co-curated with Catherine Taft) (2019), Marie Voignier, Tinselwood (2019), the group exhibition Sperm Cult and Sol LeWitt: Page-works 1967-2007 both in 2018.