Photo courtesy VMFA via Richmond Times-Dispatch
Valerie Cassel Oliver, senior curator of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, is leaving Houston to become the new curator of modern and contemporary art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) in Richmond, effective July 7, reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Cassel Oliver has been at the CAMH for 16 years and has curated such shows as Hand+Made: The Performative Impulse in Art and Craft, Benjamin Patterson: Born in the State of FLUX/us, Donald Moffett: The Extravagant Vein, and Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art. She received a Getty Research Institute fellowship for her work on Benjamin Patterson, and in 2009, she was selected as a fellow for the Center for Curatorial Leadership in New York. In 2011, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta presented Cassel Oliver with the David C. Driskell Prize, named for the African-American artist and art scholar.
Her first exhibition at the VMFA will be in January 2019 of the African-American abstract artist Howardena Pindell and will be co-curated by Naomi Beckwith from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
Congratulations to Valerie and the VMFA!
