Walker Art Center has hired two curators, Adrienne Edwards from New York City and Vincenzo de Bellis from Milan, Italy.
Adrienne Edwards, whose previous work has concentrated on the African diaspora and the global south, has been a curator at the multidisciplinary organization Performa since 2010. The New York non-profit stages a three-week-long biennial of performance events featuring 100 or more artists on stages throughout Manhattan. Founded in 2004, it also commissions performance programs in the visual arts, provides educational services, and collaborates with other organizations on performance events.
Beginning in April she will have a dual appointment in which she will keep her job at Performa and commute between New York City and Minneapolis. Her Walker title will be Curator at Large, Visual Arts.
Edwards is also a doctoral candidate in performance studies at New York University. How she will split her time among the three organizations has not yet been precisely defined said Walker spokesperson Meredith Kessler.
Vincenzo De Bellis, who was born 1977 in Putignano, Italy on the Adriatic coast, will be Curator, Visual Arts at the Walker. A co-founder in 2009 of the non-profit Peep-Hole Art Center in Milan, he has staged exhibitions featuring work by Mario Garcia Torres, Ahmet Ogut, Renata Lucas, Pavel Buchler, Gabriel Sierra, Rosalind Nashashibi and Trisha Baga among others. Peep-Hole specializes in site-specific projects often arranged in collaboration with other organizations.
Since 2012 de Bellis also has been artistic director of the International Fair of Modern and Contemporary Art in Milan. The three-day trade show attracts artists, curators, filmmakers and representatives of cultural organizations to the city for talks and events. The 2016 session runs April 8-10.
Previously he was an assistant curator at the Museuion Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Bolzano (2007) and a curatorial assistant at the Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Bergamo, Italy (2004-2006). As a freelance curator and writer he has penned exhibition catalogues and written for Artforum.com and Mousse.
De Bellis holds degrees from two Italian institutions: a BA from the Universita degli Studi in Lecce and a MA in curatorial management from the Universita degli Studi "La Sapienza" in Rome. He also earned a MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York.
His start date is contingent on securing a U.S. work visa.
De Bellis is the Walker's third international hire within the past year and the second with art fair or biennial experience. He follows Nisa Mackie who was hired in spring 2015 from the Sydney Biennial in Australia to be the Walker's Director and Curator of Education and Public Programs. In September 2015, the Walker hired Pavel Pys to be Curator of Visual Arts. Originally from Warsaw, Poland, Pys (pronounced Pish) had worked for four years as exhibitions and displays curator at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, England before joining the Walker.
