Curator's Bio

Dr. Irving Sandler is an art critic and historian who is Professor Emeritus of Art History at The State University of New York. He is a Contributing Editor of Art in America. Dr. Sandler is the author of numerous publications including four surveys of art since World War II: The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (Harper & Row, 1976), The New York School: Painters and Sculptors of the Fifties (Icon, 1989), American Art of the 1960s (HarperCollins Publishers, 1989), Art of the Postmodern Era: From the late 1960s to the Early 1990s (Westview Press, 1997). He has also written A Sweeper-Up After Artists: A Memoir (Thames & Hudson, February 9, 2009); From Avant-Garde to Pluralism: An On-The-Spot History (Hard Press Editions, 2006), and Abstract Expressionism and the American Experience: A Reevaluation (Hudson Hills Press LLC, 2009), as well as monographs on Alex Katz, Al Held and Mark di Suvero, among others. He is a former president and current board member of the United States Section of the International Association of Art Critics. He was the Director of the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, NY, and a co-founder of Artists Space in New York City. In 2008, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Art Criticism from the International Association of Art Critics.

Robert Storr is an artist, critic, curator. In 2006 he was appointed Professor of Painting and Dean of the School of Art at Yale University. Mr. Storr received a B.A. from Swarthmore College in 1972 and an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1978. He was curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from 1990 to 2002. In 2002 Mr. Storr was named the first Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Mr. Storr has taught at CUNY, the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies, Rhode Island School of Design, Tyler School of Art, New York Studio School, and Harvard University. He lectures frequently in this country and abroad. He has been a contributing editor at Art in America since 1981 and writes frequently for Artforum, Parkett, Art Press (Paris), and Frieze (London). He has also written numerous catalogs, articles, and books. Among his many honors he has received a Penny McCall Foundation Grant for painting, a Norton Family Foundation Curator Grant, and honorary doctorates from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Maine College of Art and Lyme Academy. His awards include the American Chapter of the International Association of Art Critics, a special AICA award for Distinguished Contribution to the Field of Art Criticism, an ICI Agnes Gund Curatorial Award, and the Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American Art History from the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art. In 2000 the French Ministry of Culture presented him with the medal of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. He is currently Consulting Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. and in 2007 was chosen commissioner of the 2007 Venice Biennale, the first American invited to assume that position.

Click here to read an essay titled, Painting/Writing/History by Martha Schwendener.

Click here to read an essay titled, This Not-so-Seventies Show by Peter Plagens.

Click here to read an essay titled, Decorative Contemporay by Emily Warner.