The Nasher Sculpture Heart in Dallas, a modestly sized however formidable establishment devoted to the medium, has named Carlos Basualdo as director. He succeeds longtime director Jeremy Strick, who retired in June 2024, and can begin on the Nasher on Could 12, in line with the New York Instances, which first reported the information.
For twenty years, Basualdo had been a curator on the Philadelphia Museum of Artwork (PMA). He joined as a senior curator in 2005 and was promoted to deputy director and chief curator on the finish of 2022, changing into the museum’s first-ever chief curator. In 2024 he was made curator at massive and is at present on sabbatical from the museum.
As a curator, Basualdo has had a storied profession on the biennial circuit. With the PMA serving as commissioner, he was a cocurator of the USA Pavilion on the 2009 Venice Biennale. That solo presentation by Bruce Nauman received the competition’s Golden Lion for finest nationwide participation, marking solely the second US win. He was additionally one in every of 10 curators who organized a piece inside the principle exhibition of the 2003 Venice Biennale. Moreover, he was on the curatorial staff for Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta 11 in 2002.
On the PMA, he staged formidable exhibitions, like “Jasper Johns: Thoughts/Mirror,” a collaboration with the Whitney Museum, through which the exhibition opened concurrently in 2021 at each establishments, in addition to “Dancing Across the Bride: Cage, Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg and Duchamp” in 2012, which appeared on the legacy of Marcel Duchamp with a nod to the PMA’s sturdy holding of that artist, together with his 1915–23 work The Bride Stripped Naked by Her Bachelors, Even (The Giant Glass).
Previous to the PMA, he was chief curator of exhibitions on the Wexner Heart for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, from 2000 to 2002. He additionally labored independently on main touring exhibitions like “Untitled: The Public Works of Felix Gonzalez-Torres” (1999) and “Tropicalia: A Revolution in Brazilian Tradition” (2005).
In a press release, Nasher board chair David Haemisegger stated Basualdo’s “distinguished profession and curatorial achievements align completely with our mission to champion the sphere of sculpture. Carlos’s appointment marks a dynamic new second for the museum, and we’re excited for what lies forward beneath his management and the way he’ll construct on the Nasher’s enduring legacy.”
On the Nasher, Basualdo will oversee an establishment with a $13 million working price range and a group of some 500 works, starting from sculptures by Henry Moore, Alexander Calder, Pablo Picasso, and Alberto Giacometti to Louise Bourgeois, Willem de Kooning, and Mark di Suvero to Melvin Edwards, Nicole Eisenman, and Simone Leigh. Many of those are on view in its famed out of doors sculpture backyard. (The gathering additionally contains movies and works on paper.)
Latest exhibitions in its Renzo Piano–designed constructing, positioned throughout the road from the Dallas Artwork Museum, have been devoted to Samara Golden, Hugh Hayden, Sarah Sze, Thaddeus Mosley, Carol Bove, and Betye Saar, in addition to the 2023 exhibition “Groundswell: Ladies of Land Artwork,” which aimed to revise the canon of Land artwork.
Along with its exhibition program, the Nasher awards the Nasher Prize, given to “a dwelling artist whose physique of labor has had a unprecedented affect on our understanding of sculpture,” in line with its web site. Coming with a $100,000 money prize and an exhibition on the heart, the Prize, now awarded biannually, has gone to Doris Salcedo, Pierre Huyghe, Theaster Gates, Nairy Baghramian, Senga Nengundi, and Otobong Nkanga, the present laureate whose exhibition opened earlier this yr.
In a joint interview with ARTnews in 2021, forward of the Johns exhibition opening, Basualdo spoke of his strategy to curating, influenced by his past love of poetry and the cultural scene he was part of in his dwelling nation of Argentina: “[T]right here have been vivid conversations on the time throughout a number of disciplines. I used to be enthusiastic about what an exhibition may do as a medium for combining concepts, totally different from although associated to poetry. For me, from the very starting, exhibitions have been a manner to consider making a type of extension of what I used to be attempting to do with my work as a poet.”
Replace, April 17, 2025: This text has been up to date to incorporate a press release from David Haemisegger.
