Modern Sculpture from Jean Arp to Melvin Edwards: A Conversation with Catherine Craft Part 1

with Catherine Craft, Ben Lima

ENG

February 20, 2019

Episode

Details

Catherine Craft is Curator at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas and a scholar of Dada, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Neo-Dada. She is curator of the recent exhibition The Nature of Arp, the first North American museum survey of the artist Jean (Hans) Arp in three decades; she will also oversee that exhibition’s installation at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, where it will open April 2019. Dr. Craft curated the Nasher’s 2015 touring retrospective Melvin Edwards: Five Decadesand, as with The Nature of Arp, was principal author of the accompanying publication. She was also a contributing author for Nasher exhibition catalogues on the artists Ann Veronica Janssens and Katharina Grosse; on Isamu Noguchi for Return to Earth: Ceramic Sculpture of Fontana, Melotti, Miró, Noguchi, and Picasso, 1943-1963; and Lara Almarcegui, Rachel Harrison, and Liz Larner for Nasher XChange: 10 Years. 10 Artists. 10 Sites. In 2017 she curated the group exhibition Paper into Sculpture, which examined contemporary artists who use paper as a sculptural material, and she has also worked on research and presentation of works from the Nasher’s permanent collection.

Dr. Craft holds a B.A. in art history from Texas Christian University and an M.A. from the University of Virginia. She worked in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where she worked on Robert Rauschenberg and Ellsworth Kelly exhibitions, before receiving her doctoral degree in art history from the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of An Audience of Artists: Dada, Neo-Dada, and the Emergence of Abstract Expressionism(University of Chicago, 2012) and Robert Rauschenberg(Phaidon, 2013), as well numerous articles and reviews. She has presented talks at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. As a senior research fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she conceived and co-curated the 2011 exhibition Paper Trails: Selected Works from the Permanent Collection 1934-2001. She joined the Nasher Sculpture Center in 2011.