Dan Cameron
Encyclopedia
Dan Cameron is an American art curator based in New York City
and New Orleans.
Cameron's early years were spent in Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky and in Hudson Falls, NY. He attended Hudson Falls Public Schools (1966–1974), Syracuse University (1975–76) and Bennington College (1977–79), where he earned a BA in 1979. He has been a resident of Manhattan since 1979 and a homeowner in New Orleans since 2007.
at the New Museum from 1995 to 2006, where his exhibitions included groundbreaking survey and new-work exhibitions of David Wojnarowicz
(1999), Xu Bing
(1998), Martin Wong
(1998), Carolee Schneemann
(1998), Francesco Vezzoli (2002), Carroll Dunham (2002), Teresita Fernández
, William Kentridge
(2001), Cildo Meireles
(1999–2000), Los Carpinteros
(1998), Nalini Malani (2002-3), Christian Marclay
, Paul McCarthy
(2001), Cildo Meireles
(1999–2000), Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba
(2003), Marcel Odenbach
(1998), Pierre et Gilles
(2000–2001), Ana Prada (1998), Faith Ringgold
(1998), Doris Salcedo
(1998), John Salvest (1998), Rivane Neuenschwander (1998), Cameroon artist Bili Bidjocka
(1998), and Chilean artist Eugenio Dittborn (1997). Cameron also organized such group exhibitions as East Village USA and Living Inside the Grid. Most of these exhibitions were accompanied by published catalogs with his essays.
In 2003 Cameron served as Artistic Director for the 8th Istanbul Biennial
, entitled Poetic Justice, and in 2006 he co-organized the 10th Taipei Biennial, Dirty Yoga. In 2006 he was the curator of New York, Interrupted at pkm Gallery Beijing, the first independent exhibition of recent American art in China. In 2008, as guest curator for the Orange County Museum of Art, he presented a five-decade retrospective of the American painter Peter Saul. Cameron currently serves as senior curator for Next Wave Visual Art at Brooklyn Academy of Music
(BAM), an annual exhibition of emerging Brooklyn-based artists since 2002. He is also a member of the graduate faculty of School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York, where he teaches the MFA symposium each spring for second-year students. Cameron is a member of the board of advisors of Hermitage Artist Retreat in Florida, and sits on the board of directors for Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado. In 2010 he was guest professor for the International Curator Course of the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea.
Some of Cameron’s better-known early exhibitions include Extended Sensibilities (1982, New Museum); Art and its Double (1986–87, Fundacion ‘la Caixa,’ Barcelona and Madrid); What is Contemporary Art? (1989, Roosem, Malmo); The Savage Garden (1991, Fundacion ‘la Caixa,’ Madrid); and Cocido y Crudo (1994, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid). Besides organizing major exhibitions in cities like Moscow, Mexico City, Valencia, Vienna, Cape Town, Rio de Janeiro, and Los Angeles, he is a frequently published writer on contemporary art, with hundreds of museum catalogs essays, book texts, and magazine articles to his credit. His most recent publications include critical essays for Alexandre Arrechea: Todo Algo Nada (2009, Centro de Ate, Caja de Burgos, Spain); Nick Cave: Meet Me at the Center of the Earth (2009, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco); and Skylar Fein: Youth Manifesto (2009, New Orleans Museum of Art
).
Cameron is founder and artistic director of U.S. Biennial, Inc, a not-for-profit (501c3) organization that produces Prospect New Orleans
, a new international biennial whose first edition opened in November 2008 at multiple sites around the city, and closed in January 2009. Prospect.1 was the largest contemporary art biennial in U.S. history, with 80 artists from around the world in 24 venues with a total of nearly 300000 square feet (27,870.9 m²). From 2007 to 2010 Cameron also served as Director of Visual Arts for the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, where he presented solo projects by artists like Luis Cruz Azaceta, Tony Feher and Peter Saul
, as well as the group exhibitions Something from Nothing, Make-it-Right, Previously on Piety, Interplay, and Hot Up Here.
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
and New Orleans.
Cameron's early years were spent in Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky and in Hudson Falls, NY. He attended Hudson Falls Public Schools (1966–1974), Syracuse University (1975–76) and Bennington College (1977–79), where he earned a BA in 1979. He has been a resident of Manhattan since 1979 and a homeowner in New Orleans since 2007.
Career
He was senior curatorCurator
A curator is a manager or overseer. Traditionally, a curator or keeper of a cultural heritage institution is a content specialist responsible for an institution's collections and involved with the interpretation of heritage material...
at the New Museum from 1995 to 2006, where his exhibitions included groundbreaking survey and new-work exhibitions of David Wojnarowicz
David Wojnarowicz
David Wojnarowicz was a painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, and activist who was prominent in the New York City art world of the 1980s.-Biography:...
(1999), Xu Bing
Xu Bing
Xu Bing is a Chinese-born artist, resident in the United States since 1990. He currently resides in Beijing.-Biography:...
(1998), Martin Wong
Martin Wong
Martin Wong was a U.S. painter of the late twentieth century.-Early years:Wong was born in Portland, Oregon and raised in the Chinatown district of San Francisco, California. He studied ceramics at Humboldt State University, graduating in 1968...
(1998), Carolee Schneemann
Carolee Schneemann
Carolee Schneemann is an American visual artist, known for her discourses on the body, sexuality and gender. She received a B.A. from Bard College and an M.F.A. from the University of Illinois. Her work is primarily characterized by research into visual traditions, taboos, and the body of the...
(1998), Francesco Vezzoli (2002), Carroll Dunham (2002), Teresita Fernández
Teresita Fernandez
Teresita Fernández is a contemporary sculptor and artist based in New York. A recipient of the 2005 MacArthur Foundation "Genius Fellowship", Fernández's work is characterized by an interest in perception and the psychology of looking. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003 and the Louis...
, William Kentridge
William Kentridge
William Kentridge is a South African artist best known for his prints, drawings, and animated films. These are constructed by filming a drawing, making erasures and changes, and filming it again. He continues this process meticulously, giving each change to the drawing a quarter of a second to two...
(2001), Cildo Meireles
Cildo Meireles
Cildo Meireles is a Brazilian conceptual artist, installation artist and sculptor. He is noted especially for his installations, many of which express resistance to political oppression in Brazil. These works, often large and dense, encourage the viewer's interaction.-Life:Cildo Meireles was born...
(1999–2000), Los Carpinteros
Los Carpinteros
Los Carpinteros is the name of a group of young Cuban artists that specializes in creating humorous installations and objects. In 1991 Marco Antonio Castillo Valdes, Dagoberto Rodriguez Sanchez, and Alexandre Arrechea formed Los Carpinteros—however they didn’t adopt the name until 1994, “deciding...
(1998), Nalini Malani (2002-3), Christian Marclay
Christian Marclay
Christian Marclay is a Swiss-American visual artist and composer.Marclay's work explores connections between sound, noise, photography, video, and film...
, Paul McCarthy
Paul McCarthy
Paul McCarthy , is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California.-Life:McCarthy was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and studied art at the University of Utah in 1969. He went on to study at the San Francisco Art Institute receiving a BFA in painting...
(2001), Cildo Meireles
Cildo Meireles
Cildo Meireles is a Brazilian conceptual artist, installation artist and sculptor. He is noted especially for his installations, many of which express resistance to political oppression in Brazil. These works, often large and dense, encourage the viewer's interaction.-Life:Cildo Meireles was born...
(1999–2000), Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba
Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba
Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba was born in Tokyo to a Japanese mother and a Vietnamese father in 1968, the year of the Tet Offensive staged by the Vietcong and North Vietnamese troops. He earned an M.F.A. from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1994 after receiving his B.F.A. from the School of the...
(2003), Marcel Odenbach
Marcel Odenbach
Marcel Odenbach, with Ulrike Rosenbach and Klaus vom Bruch, is one of the most well-established and internationally known German video artists. In the 1970s, they formed the producer group ATV...
(1998), Pierre et Gilles
Pierre et Gilles
Pierre et Gilles, Pierre Commoy and Gilles Blanchard, are French artists and romantic partners. They produce highly stylized photographs, building their own sets and costumes as well as retouching the photographs...
(2000–2001), Ana Prada (1998), Faith Ringgold
Faith Ringgold
Faith Ringgold is an African American artist, best known for her painted story quilts. She is professor emeritus in the University of California, San Diego visual art department.-Life and artwork:...
(1998), Doris Salcedo
Doris Salcedo
Doris Salcedo is a Colombian-born sculptor.Salcedo completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano in 1980, before traveling to New York, where she completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at New York University. She then returned to Bogotá to teach at the Universidad...
(1998), John Salvest (1998), Rivane Neuenschwander (1998), Cameroon artist Bili Bidjocka
Bili Bidjocka
Bili Bidjocka is a contemporary Cameroonian artist best known for his installations and sculptures. He was born in Douala, Cameroon, lives in France since the age of 12, and works in Paris, Brussels and New York.- Biography :...
(1998), and Chilean artist Eugenio Dittborn (1997). Cameron also organized such group exhibitions as East Village USA and Living Inside the Grid. Most of these exhibitions were accompanied by published catalogs with his essays.
In 2003 Cameron served as Artistic Director for the 8th Istanbul Biennial
Istanbul Biennial
The International Istanbul Biennial is a contemporary art exhibition, held every two years in Istanbul, Turkey, since 1987. The biennial is organised by the İstanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts. The Biennial aims to create a meeting point in İstanbul in the field of visual arts between artists...
, entitled Poetic Justice, and in 2006 he co-organized the 10th Taipei Biennial, Dirty Yoga. In 2006 he was the curator of New York, Interrupted at pkm Gallery Beijing, the first independent exhibition of recent American art in China. In 2008, as guest curator for the Orange County Museum of Art, he presented a five-decade retrospective of the American painter Peter Saul. Cameron currently serves as senior curator for Next Wave Visual Art at Brooklyn Academy of Music
Brooklyn Academy of Music
Brooklyn Academy of Music is a major performing arts venue in Brooklyn, a borough of New York City, United States, known as a center for progressive and avant garde performance....
(BAM), an annual exhibition of emerging Brooklyn-based artists since 2002. He is also a member of the graduate faculty of School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York, where he teaches the MFA symposium each spring for second-year students. Cameron is a member of the board of advisors of Hermitage Artist Retreat in Florida, and sits on the board of directors for Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado. In 2010 he was guest professor for the International Curator Course of the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea.
Some of Cameron’s better-known early exhibitions include Extended Sensibilities (1982, New Museum); Art and its Double (1986–87, Fundacion ‘la Caixa,’ Barcelona and Madrid); What is Contemporary Art? (1989, Roosem, Malmo); The Savage Garden (1991, Fundacion ‘la Caixa,’ Madrid); and Cocido y Crudo (1994, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid). Besides organizing major exhibitions in cities like Moscow, Mexico City, Valencia, Vienna, Cape Town, Rio de Janeiro, and Los Angeles, he is a frequently published writer on contemporary art, with hundreds of museum catalogs essays, book texts, and magazine articles to his credit. His most recent publications include critical essays for Alexandre Arrechea: Todo Algo Nada (2009, Centro de Ate, Caja de Burgos, Spain); Nick Cave: Meet Me at the Center of the Earth (2009, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco); and Skylar Fein: Youth Manifesto (2009, New Orleans Museum of Art
New Orleans Museum of Art
The New Orleans Museum of Art is the oldest fine arts museum in the city of New Orleans. It is situated within City Park, a short distance from the intersection of Carrollton Avenue and Esplanade Avenue, and near the terminus of the "Canal Street - City Park" streetcar line...
).
Cameron is founder and artistic director of U.S. Biennial, Inc, a not-for-profit (501c3) organization that produces Prospect New Orleans
Prospect New Orleans
Prospect New Orleans is a multi-venue contemporary art event in New Orleans."Prospect.1 New Orleans" ran from November 2008 to January 2009. Conceived in the tradition of the great international biennials, such as the Venice Biennale, São Paulo Biennial, Istanbul Biennial, it showcased new artistic...
, a new international biennial whose first edition opened in November 2008 at multiple sites around the city, and closed in January 2009. Prospect.1 was the largest contemporary art biennial in U.S. history, with 80 artists from around the world in 24 venues with a total of nearly 300000 square feet (27,870.9 m²). From 2007 to 2010 Cameron also served as Director of Visual Arts for the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, where he presented solo projects by artists like Luis Cruz Azaceta, Tony Feher and Peter Saul
Peter Saul
PETER SAUL is an American painter. His work has connections with Pop Art, Surrealism,and Expressionism. His early use of pop culture cartoon references in the late 1950s and very early 1960s situates him as one of the few fathers of the Pop Art movement...
, as well as the group exhibitions Something from Nothing, Make-it-Right, Previously on Piety, Interplay, and Hot Up Here.