The director of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Marla Price, has announced that this summer the chief curator Michael Auping will retire.
Senior Curator Andrea Karnes will be taking over the management and administration of the curatorial department at the Modern, according to the news release.
Auping has worked with the museum for over 20 years and started in 1993 after working as the chief curator at the Albright–Knox Gallery located in Buffalo, New York.
“We are grateful to Michael for his enormous contributions to this organization, the Fort Worth arts community, and the art world over the past 24 years,” said Price. “His scholarship has elevated the Modern to international status among modern and contemporary art institutions. We thank him for his dedication, and applaud the legacy he leaves.”
The press release states that Auping was a key player in acquiring pivotal works for the permanent collection. Some examples of these works include:
– Richard Serra’s Vortex, 2002 (which was given in Auping’s honor)
– Martin Puryear’s Ladder for Booker T. Washington, 1996
– Works from the seventies, eighties and nineties by Anselm Kiefer
– Significant works from artists such as: Agnes Martin, Gerhard Richter, Cindy Sherman, Georg Baselitz, Carl Andre, Richard Long, Vija Celmins, Bruce Nauman and Robert Motherwell.
He also organized many critically acclaimed exhibitions, said the press release, including:
– Arshile Gorky: The Breakthrough Years
– Georg Baselitz: Portraits of Elke
– Philip Guston Retrospective
– Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth
– Declaring Space: Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein
– Ed Ruscha: Road Tested
– Susan Rothenberg: Moving in Place
– Vernon Fisher: K–Mart Conceptualism
– Lucian Freud: Portraits (which was co-organized with the National Portrait Gallery in London)
– Urban Theater: New York Art in the 1980s
– Frank Stella: A Retrospective (which was co-organized with the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York)
Many of these exhibits have also traveled all over the world including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC and the Royal Academy in London.
Auping was also a member of the team that managed the building project for the Modern’s world-renowned Tadao Ando building.
Currently, Auping is working on two books that are set to be released in December 2017. One book will document the Modern’s Ando building and history, while the other features conversations Auping has had with artists during his 40-year career that was dedicated to preserving the artist’s voice and will be titled Forty Years: Just Talking about Art.
For more information about the Modern go to themodern.org