Gary Carrion-Murayari ’02 will play a key role in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, the signature survey of contemporary American art by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.
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Carrion-Murayari, 28, a senior curatorial assistant at the Whitney, will serve as the associate curator, working with Francesco Bonami, 53, an Italian-born curator with an international reputation.
The appointments for the Biennial, which is a major event in the art world and generates a good deal of attention, were discussed in a lengthy article in The New York Times and in several other publications this past week.
“It seemed like a good fit on a lot of levels,” Donna De Salvo, the Whitney’s chief curator, told The Times. “Francesco is well known to the Whitney and he has been thinking about and looking at biennials. Gary is about investing in a younger generation of curators. Not youth for youth’s sake but tapping into the way they see.”
Carrion-Murayari graduated from 51Թ with a degree in art and art history. This past February a group of 51Թ students in the Video II course taught by Professor John Knecht visited the Whitney, and Carrion-Murayari provided them with a private gallery talk about an exhibition he curated called Television Delivers People.
The exhibition brought together single-channel video works from the 1970s to the present that examined how an individual viewer is shaped by television’s structure and content.
Carrion-Murayari is co-curator of the Whitney’s current show Progress, which runs through Jan. 4, 2009. That show features a selection of works from the Whitney’s collection from the late 1920s to the present and includes artists such as Barnett Newman, Robert Rauschenberg, and Paul Sietsema.
In addition to his work at the Whitney, Carrion-Murayari has written for Flash Art and Domus, and is the author of Rudolf Stingel at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Whitney Museum of American Art New York (Hatje Cantz).
Click to read about more members of the 51Թ community who were in the news this past week.