Anderson Series Lecture by Senior Curator Valerie Smith

January 25, 2007

Valerie Smith, director of exhibitions and senior curator for Queens Museum of Art, Queens, N.Y., will give a lecture titled “The Curiosities of Curating” at 11:30 a.m. on Tuesday, February 6, in the Palmer Lipcon Auditorium, Palmer Museum of Art. The lecture is sponsored by the Penn State School of Visual Arts’ John M. Anderson Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series and is free to the public.

Smith, the juror for the School of Visual Arts’ 2007 BFA Exhibition, received a B.A. in art history from Barnard College and a M.A. in art history from the Graduate Center of City University of New York. She served as curator for the groundbreaking alternative gallery, Artists Space, in New York City, from 1981-89, and from 1991-93, was the director of Sonsbeek 93 in Arnhem, Holland, an international triennial exhibition of 103 site-specific installations by such artists as Miroslaw Balka (Poland), Juan Munoz (Spain), Mike Kelley and Ann Hamilton (United States). She has been senior curator for the Queens Museum since 1999 where she won an award for the exhibition Joan Jonas, Five Works (2004) from the International Association of Art Critics.

Contact: Sarah Schwartz, ses32@psu.edu