Williams College Museum of Art has a new director12:00AM / Thursday, May 12, 2005
 | | Lisa Corrin |
Williamstown ÂAfter a national search, Williams College announced today that Lisa Corrin will become director of the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) beginning this fall. Corrin is deputy director of art and the Jon and Mary Shirley Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM).
"The Search Committee was impressed by Lisa's enthusiasm and creativity," Williams Provost Catharine Hill said. "She is particularly looking forward to working with the museum within the context of the college, integrating what happens at WCMA with the curriculum and the campus community. At the same time, her extensive experience working collaboratively will enhance the museum's relationships with The Clark Art Institute and MASS MoCA."
Former Director Linda Shearer left WCMA last summer to become director of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati. Marion Goethals serves as interim director.
"I'm thrilled by the prospect of collaborating with the Williams faculty and WCMA staff to explore ways to expand the role of the museum in interdisciplinary undergraduate education," Corrin said. "The museum is a critical arena for discussion about works of art across time and across cultures that can lead to significant insights about our lives today. My goal is to use visual culture study at the museum to enable visitors to "read" the world around them.
"To this end, I see WCMA working actively with the faculty, students, administration, alumni, and visiting committee to think strategically about ways to ensure that the museum's mission remains dynamic and responsive to the evolving context of Williams within its community and within the changing cultural landscape beyond the Berkshires."
At SAM, where she began in 2001, Corrin manages a team of 14, including eight curators, and supervises budgeting for the museum's curatorial, exhibition, and acquisitions activities. She serves as senior curator of modern and contemporary art and as artistic overseer of the museum's new 8.5-acre waterfront Olympic Sculpture Park. The new space, scheduled to open summer 2006, will include commissioned work by Mark Dion and Teresita Fernandez along with pieces by Richard Serra, Tony Smith, Mark DiSuvero, and Alexander Calder.
Among her exhibitions at SAM was "Baja to Vancouver: The West Coast and Contemporary Art," which explored the role of place in the work of current artists in that region co-organized by SAM, Vancouver Art Gallery, MCA San Diego, and the Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art at the California College of Art in San Francisco. In crafting the exhibition program, Corrin placed great emphasis on diversity, increasing the museum's global perspective and raising the visibility of contemporary art.
She began an active program of exhibitions and acquisitions of contemporary Asian art and led SAM's curatorial team in rethinking the historical narrative of the permanent collection for its new presentation when the museum's expansion is completed in 2007. Among the major acquisitions under her leadership are "Shadow Procession," a video installation by South African artist William Kentridge, "Some/One," a monumental installation using thousands of dog-tags by Korean artist Do-Ho Suh, "Wake," a recent work by Richard Serra, five modern sculptures from the collection of Virginia and Bagley Wright, and the CAP Collection, featuring 33 works by an international lineup of young artists amassed by an enterprising group of first-time Seattle collectors.
Corrin also secured important loan exhibitions from museums within and outside the U.S., including "Only Skin Deep," an exhibition exploring the subject of race in photography curated by Coco Fusco for the ICP, New York, and retrospectives of Jacob Lawrence (Phillips Collection), Isamu Noguchi (Vitra Museum, Germany), and Charles LeDray (ICA, Philadelphia), and she actively encouraged the circulation of exhibitions organized by SAM curators accompanied by significant publications including an exhibition of African art drawn from its collection and another drawn from the Spanish royal collections.
Corrin has lectured on art and museum-related subjects at a dozen colleges, universities, and organizations in the U.S. and abroad, including the Royal College of Art in London, the Getty Center for Education and the Arts, and, soon after graduating from college, served as a faculty member in English language and literature at the American Collegiate Institute in Izmir, Turkey. She is currently teaching a graduate seminar in the Department of Art History at the University of Washington.
From 1997 to 2001 Corrin served as chief curator at The Serpentine Gallery in London, considered one of Europe's premier contemporary art spaces, where she curated more than 20 exhibitions, including presentations of the work of Brice Marden, William Kentridge, Andreas Gursky, Chris Ofili, Louise Bourgeois, Rachel Whiteread, Gillian Wearing, Do-Ho Suh, Mariko Mori, Bridget Riley, and Gilbert and George. Many of her exhibitions there were partnerships with such museums as the Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Bordeaux, the National Museum of Modern Art in Edinburgh, Scotland, the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, and the MAK and the Kunsthalle, both in Vienna.
She also developed collaborative exhibitions with other London museums including the "Greenhouse Effect" with the Museum of Natural History and "Give & Take" with the Victoria and Albert Museum. "Give and Take" enabled contemporary artists to show their work in the galleries of the V& A while the artist Hans Haacke removed 180 objects from the V&A's collections to the Serpentine Gallery. The exhibition was recently documented in a monograph on Haacke published by Phaidon Press.
From 1989 to 1997, Corrin helped develop a nomadic museum, The Contemporary Museum of Baltimore. In 1992 the American Association of Museums named as Exhibition of the Year her "Mining the Museum: An Installation by Fred Wilson." Wilson, since awarded a MacArthur "genius" grant, used objects from the Maryland Historical Society to reflect how that museum has historically viewed people of color and how that community views the museum. Her book on the exhibition was awarded the Wittenborn Prize by the North American Association of Art Librarians. In 1993 Corrin was named by the College Art Association as a Rockefeller Fellow for Multicultural Scholarship in the Visual Arts.
She has written scores of reviews, essays, interviews and catalogues, including contributing to "Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video From China," a book accompanying an exhibition organized by the ICP, Asia Society, Smart Museum of Art, and MCA Chicago, which is traveling internationally. For the publisher Phaidon she co-authored a book on artist Mark Dion.
Corrin studied at University College, London and earned a B.A. with honors in art history at Mary Washington College. She has done graduate course work at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in the MA Program in Art History, Theory and Criticism and Art History at Johns Hopkins University.
One of the finest college art museums in the country, WCMA houses 12,000 works that span the history of art. Within the broad range of time periods and cultures represented, the collection emphasizes modern and contemporary art, American art from the late 18th century to the present, and the art of world cultures. Admission to the museum is always free as are a host of educational programs available to the public. |
