Tuesday, May 31, 2011

INTERNATIONAL ARTIST PRINT PORTFOLIO
About the Curator
Irene Hofmann

Irene Hofmann is the first curator for the international artist print portfolio at Sol Print Studios.  She will be selecting four to five international artists to produce an edition with Soledad Salame.

Hofmann was most recently the Executive Director of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore.  Effective as of October 1, Irene Hofmann is the new Phillips director and chief of SITE Santa Fe. 
She joined the Contemporary Museum in January 2006 after spending four years as Curator of Contemporary Art at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, California.  During that time she organized exhibitions such as the 2002 and 2004 California Biennial and Girls' Night Out, a national touring exhibition featuring work by a new generation of women photographers and video artists.

During her work with the Contemporary, she commisioned over a dozen international artists to create new works in response to the city of Baltimore, brought various communities into the process of an artist's work and collaborated with a number of Baltimore's cultural institutions.  Some of her exhibitions for the Contemporary Museum include:  Cell Phone, a survey of recent artworks created using cellphone technologies; St. Cecilia, a new comission and national touring exhibition of works by Chicago-based artist Joesph Grigely, Broadcast, an exhibition that explored the artist as entrepreneur, featuring several installations throughout the city including an Edible Estate front yard garden by Fritz Haeg, and a storefront installation on Saratoga by Lisa Anne Auerbach.

In addition to her last position at The Contemporary Museum, she has held positions at Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Walker At Center in Minneapolis, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.  She holds a BA in Art History from Washington University in St. Louis, and a MA in Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.