HOUSTON, TX.- Josef Helfenstein, director of the
Menil Collection, has named Michelle White to the position of Associate Curator.
In her new role, Ms. White, formerly Assistant Curator, will work with colleagues in developing exhibitions and programming and initiating object-based research projects related to the museum’s collection of modern and contemporary art. She will also work closely with Bernice Rose, Chief Curator of the Menil Drawing Institute and Study Center, on exhibition programming (such as Cy Twombly: Treatise on the Veil, opening this month) and collection management of the museum's holdings of works on paper.
Ms. White is organizing the exhibition Leaps into the Void: Documents of Nouveau Réalist Performance, opening in March; with Ms. Rose she is co-curating a retrospective exhibition of Richard Serra drawings (opening in 2011 and traveling to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art).
Most recently Ms. White organized the Menil exhibition Imaginary Spaces and cocurated, with Franklin Sirmans, Lessons from Below: Otabenga Jones & Associates.
Co-organizer of “Making History: Curating Contemporary Art,” a two-year series of lectures presented by the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Menil, Ms. White is a frequent contributor to Art Papers and served for three years as the regional editor of the quarterly journal, Art Lies. She has also taught at the Glassell School of Art (2005-2006) and served on the board of directors of Lawndale Art Center (2005-2007).
Prior to joining to the Menil in 2006 Ms. White was curatorial assistant in the department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (where she curated the exhibition Originality and Repetition: The Grid in Contemporary Works on Paper) and an assistant at the Mongan Center for Prints and Drawings at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University.
Ms. White received her M.A. in Art History from Tufts University in 2004 and her B.A. in Art History and Criticism at the University of California, San Diego.
