The Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) has announced the appointment of Vivian Crockett as The Nancy and Tim Hanley Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art. The announcement of Dr. Agustín Arteaga’s appointment by the Director of the DMA, highlights Crockett’s expertise in contemporary art with a specialization in art of the African and Latinx diasporas and the Americas.
Crockett is currently both a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and a PhD candidate in Art History at Columbia University. She graduated with an undergraduate degree in Art History from Stanford University. Her dissertation at Columbia is on the works of Brazilian artists Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Pape in the late 1960s through the 1970s.
In 2017–2018, Crockett was an Andrew W. Mellon Museum Research Consortium Fellow in the Museum of Modern Art’s Media and Performance Art department, providing research and curatorial support for Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done (2018); she also co-curated Visual AIDS’ 2017 Day With(out) Art: Alternate Endings, Radical Beginnings, a National Endowment for the Arts grant-funded exhibition. Crockett was also a lead researcher from 2008 to 2011 in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Painting and Sculpture department, where she worked with curator Sarah Roberts.
Beginning March 9 at the DMA, Crockett will join Vivian Li, The Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art, and Anna Katherine Brodbeck, The Hoffman Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, to shape the exhibition and public program schedule of the museum.
States Dr. Arteaga: “We have been actively expanding the range of curatorial expertise and programming at the DMA to reflect both the incredible breadth of our encyclopedic collection and our diverse audiences locally, nationally, and internationally. Vivian’s knowledge and scholarly contributions bring an exciting perspective to the research, presentation, and study of contemporary art, and build on the team’s existing expertise across the global spectrum of artistic practice.”
Brodbeck adds: “Vivian has a demonstrated commitment to bringing under-explored artists and practices to the fore. I’m looking forward to working with her to support the DMA’s global and inclusive approach to contemporary art and to contributing new scholarship that helps expand the narrative of art history.”
States Crockett: “I am thrilled to join the DMA, an institution that has been at the forefront of shaping conversations on historic and contemporary art practices. The collection’s international scope in postwar and contemporary art will allow us to further the DMA’s commitment to representing the diverse histories and cultures of visitors through exhibitions and programs that are transnational, highlight understudied and underrepresented artists, and support contemporary artists.”
For more on the DMA, please visit its website here, or read Glasstire’s most recent DMA exhibition review here.