The Hunter College Department of Art and Art History announces a public lecture by Hamza Walker, Director of Education and Associate Curator at the Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago, Wednesday April 29, at 7:30pm in the Kossak Lecture Hall, located in the Hunter North Building, entrance on East 69th Street between Park and Lexington Avenues in Manhattan.

Born in 1966 in New York City, Hamza Walker is the Director of Education and Associate Curator for the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. His exhibitions at the Renaissance Society include Teen Paranormal Romance (2014), Suicide Narcissus (2013), and Black Is, Black Ain’t (2008), which explored important shifts in the rhetoric of race. In December 2014, he was announced as co-curator of the Hammer Museum’s next Los Angeles biennial, Made in LA 2016.

Walker is the recipient of the 1999 Norton Curatorial Grant and the 2004 Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement, presented by the Menil Collection. In 2010, he was awarded the New Museum’s Ordway Prize; named for the naturalist, philanthropist, and arts patron Katherine Ordway, the prize acknowledges the contributions of a curator whose work has had significant impact on the field of contemporary art. In 2001, the New York Times named Walker one of the seven most influential curators in the country, noting that « a powerful exhibition depends on words as well as pictures, and Mr. Walker is recognized as one of the museum world’s most talented essayists, as well as for his storytelling approach to organizing shows. »

Walker has contributed reviews and art criticism to New Art Examiner, Art Muscle, Dialogue, Parkett, and Artforum, in addition to numerous catalogue essays on artists ranging from Giovanni Anselmo and Darren Almond to Thomas Hirschhorn and Heimo Zobernig. Prior to his work at the Renaissance Society, Walker was the Public Art Coordinator for the City of Chicago, Department of Cultural Affairs.

The Foundation To-Life, Inc. Arthur and Carol Kaufman Goldberg Curatorial Workshops are designed to bring curators of international stature to the Hunter campus to work with students in the MA program in Art History and the MFA program in Studio Art for an extended period of time. During his two-week residency, Walker will meet with students individually and in small groups, and participate in curatorial seminars taught by Hunter faculty. The Foundation To-Life Curatorial Workshop program recognizes the curatorial interests and ambitions of Hunter students and the Hunter College Art Galleries’ longstanding commitment to exhibitions whose themes, theses, and checklists have been developed and honed by our students.  In the past few years, faculty-initiated, seminar-based exhibitions have included Open Work in Latin America, New York & Beyond: Conceptualism Reconsidered 1967–78 (2013), Peripheral Visions: Italian Photography in Context, 1950s-Present (2012), Notations: The Cage Effect Today (2012), and Objects of Devotion and Desire: Medieval Relic to Contemporary Art (2011).

Wednesday, April 29, 2015, 7:30pm
Hunter College
Kossak Lecture Hall
1527 Hunter North Building
New York, NY

www.hunter.cuny.edu