Aldrich Curatorial Director Joins Mills College Art Museum
April, 2007
Jessica Hough’s progress from curatorial intern to curatorial director at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is proof of the importance of vision and passion in the art world. The next stage of her journey will take her to the west coast.
Director Harry Philbrick announced today that Hough has accepted the position of director at the Mills College Art Museum in Oakland, California, which she will take up in the Summer of 2007. In her new capacity, Hough will oversee the institution’s program of contemporary art exhibitions, manage a collection of over 8,000 objects, and plan the institution’s expansion.
Philbrick comments, “Hough has played a key role in the curatorial development of The Aldrich for the better part of the last decade, and her dedication to the institution will be difficult to replace. I have greatly appreciated her sound curatorial judgment and her commitment to both the Museum and the artists with whom she has worked.”
Hough initially joined The Aldrich as a graduate intern in 1998. Following the completion of her Master’s degree from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in New York, she joined the staff as assistant curator. Hough comments, “I was so impressed with the leadership at The Aldrich. Harry Philbrick and exhibitions director Richard Klein seemed to be willing to consider any suggestion. They were experimental and daring with their exhibitions, and supportive of artists to an extent I had never seen. There was no question that I wanted to be a part of their team.”
Hough reminisces, “Over the past several years we have done some spectacular things together. One of the most important and formative times for me at The Aldrich was the lead up to Ann Hamilton’s exhibition whitecloth in 1999. Ann took over the entire Old Hundred building for her exhibition and made work specifically to respond to the history of the building. The technical ambition of the work was astounding—a white silk cloth that moved on a wire throughout the galleries, a vibrating pool of water, and a spinning floor that visitors could stand on. The dedication from the Museum team was incredible. Everyone was on board to do everything they could to get the exhibition up and open. Harry and Richard never seemed to have any regrets or a sense that they had promised the artist too much. It was simply about realizing her vision, no matter what.”
Hough’s first major project at The Aldrich was to spearhead the development of the exhibition Faith: The Impact of Judeo-Christian Religion on Art at the Millennium (2000). She coordinated a team of curators that included Philbrick and Klein, as well as artists Christian Eckart and Osvaldo Romberg, over the year prior to the opening. Hough was successful in helping to secure a grant from the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation in the amount of $125,000 to support the exhibition and catalogue, and led a complementary symposium at The Drawing Center in New York on the subject of art and religion.
In 1999, Hough also co-curated The Nude in Contemporary Art, a large-scale group exhibition featuring Karen Finley’s Go Figure. Finley’s piece consisted of a traditional drawing class with nude model, which when held in one of the Museum’s galleries became re-contextualized as a performative and participatory artwork. Another early exhibition was Glee: Painting Now, co-curated with Amy Cappellazzo (now the international co-head of post-war and contemporary art for Christie’s), which highlighted abstract painting influenced by the aesthetics of digital imagery. More recently, Hough co-curated Karkhana: A Contemporary Collaboration (2006), work by six artists who all graduated from the miniature program at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan, and Land Mine: Laleh Khorramian, Wangechi Mutu, and Michael Zansky (2006) an exhibition of work by artists who use landscape as a vehicle for addressing war, politics, and human suffering.
Over her years at The Aldrich, Hough has curated solo exhibitions and projects of work by Haluk Akakçe, Josh Azzarella, Janice Caswell, Jon Conner, Roman de Salvo, Olafur Eliasson, Todd Hebert, Cyrilla Mozenter, Carl Ostendarp, Shannon Plumb, Jonathan Seliger, Lisa Sigal, Shahzia Sikander, Alyson Shotz, and Yuken Teruya, among others. Hough is currently working on a group exhibition of artists who take as their subject modern architecture, which she is co-curating with Monica Montagut, assistant curator for architecture and design at the Guggenheim. The exhibition will be seen at The Aldrich and Yale Art + Architecture Gallery in March 2008 and will travel to Mills College Art Museum among other venues.
Image: The Aldrich Curatorial Team: Richard Klein, exhibitions director, Jessica Hough, curatorial director, and Harry Philbrick, director. Courtesy of Steven Needham.
