Olga Viso, Star Tribune staff photo by Tom Wallace

Walker Art Center's director Olga Viso will oversee the contemporary art center's curatorial affairs in the interim following the departure of Chief Curator Darsie Alexander who is leaving for a new post as executive director of the Katona Museum of Art in New York.

"All of us at the Walker are very excited about Darsie's new appointment and I am delighted to have a new colleague among the museum director ranks," Viso said in a statement. "I look forward to overseeing curatorial affairs at the Walker in the interim as we search for new curatorial talent for the team."

Trained as a curator, Viso has continued to organize exhibitions since taking the Walker post in 2008. Her book "Unseen Mendieta," about the pioneering feminist artist Ana Mendieta, was published the year she arrived in Minneapolis, and her exhibition "Guillermo Kuitca: Everything," opened in 2010. Next month she will open a new exhibition "Jim Hodges: Give More Than You Take," the first U.S.survey of the poetic sculptures and mixed media work of the American artist from whom the Walker commissioned a major outdoor sculpture in 2013.

The Walker's curatorial departments include visual art, performing arts and film.

Previously Viso served 13 years at the Hirshhorn Museum of Art in Washington, D.C., starting as an assistant curator and rising to be deputy director in 2003.