Wednesday, October 9 @ 5:00 – 6:15pm
Elvehjem L160
FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Aaron Levi Garvey is a Jewish-American Curator and Historian specializing in Modern and Contemporary Arts and Culture and currently serves as Director of the Art Museum of West Virginia University. He has worked with esteemed institutions, including as the Janet L. Nolan director of curatorial affairs at the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University, Founding Chief Curator of The Hudson Eye and Long Road Projects Foundation, and chief curator of the Andy Warhol Museum. Recent exhibitions and collaborations include: serving as Guest Juror for the Janet & Walter Sondheim Art Prize in Baltimore, visiting curator at STABLE in Washington DC, curating The Hudson Eye, a ten-day and fourteen-venue arts focused program in Hudson, New York, Arc of Life/Ark of Bones by Walter Hood and Migratory Roots by Kevin Brisco at the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University, Flashing the Leather and The Drowned group exhibitions at Alabama Contemporary, Chiharu Shiota’s site-specific installation “Infinity Lines” at the SCAD Museum of Art, “Ephemera Obscura” at the Contemporary Art Center of New Orleans and Manon Bellet’s “MEMO” and Shikeith’s “notes towards becoming a spill” both at Atlanta Contemporary. Additionally Garvey curated “We Are What You Eat,” the inaugural art exhibition at the United Nations headquarters in New York City in 2016 and co-curated the Atlanta Biennial (ATLBNL): Recent Correspondence at the Atlanta Contemporary in August of 2016.
During his role as the Janet L. Nolan director of curatorial affairs at the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, Garvey worked on numerous high level projects including the cultivation of institutional supporters on passion initiatives such as the Martin Moss Freeman ’77 Fund for Excellence endowment to support the acquisition of Jewish contemporary artists; rewriting and implementing a new collection management policy with a focus on up-to-date collecting practices, conservation and diversity, equity, inclusion and access; guiding the curatorial department’s deliverables for American Association of Museums reaccreditation; acquiring works by leading women, POC and LGBTQIA+ artists into the collection; conceptualizing and curating a serialized group of exhibitions by emerging and established contemporary artists entitled Radical Naturalism which investigates the museum’s permanent collection and the legacy of John James Audubon; and leading a cross departmental collaborative endeavor to commission and install public art within university department buildings and accession works into the collection.
Garvey has worked with Creative Capital for the Visual Arts grant award review panels as both an Evaluator and Grant Reader in 2014 and 2018 and most recently has been a visiting curator and lecturer at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, College for Creative Arts in Detroit, Michigan, and the Kimball Art Center in Park City, Utah, and is a collaborating curator with Independent Curators International. Beyond his work within museums and universities; Garvey co-founded the Long Road Projects Foundation a non-profit residency program and edition-publishing house for both emerging and established artists to work on experimental projects, publish unique editions and community engagements. aaronlevigarvey.com