Belgian-born Dieter Roelstraete has been appointed the new Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. He will assume the role in February 2012.
Roelstraete is currently Curator at MuHKA, the Museum of Contemporary Art (Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst) in Antwerp, Belgium, where he has worked since 2003. There he has organized many notable exhibitions and collaborative projects, including “Academy: Learning from Art” (2006); “All That Is Solid Melts Into Air” (2009); “Liam Gillick and Lawrence Weiner – A Syntax of Dependency” (2011); and a retrospective of Chantal Akerman’s work that will open in 2012. Additionally, he has curated projects at the Venice Biennale, Vancouver Art Gallery, De Appel in Amsterdam, and in various European institutions and galleries.
Roelstraete has written extensively on contemporary art and philosophy for many international publications. He serves as editor of Afterall, contributing editor to A Prior Magazine, and co-founded the journal FR David at De Appel, where he is also a tutor.
In the press release distributed by the MCA, James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator Michael Darling stated: “Dieter is a wildly productive and extraordinarily smart curator who has addressed a wide range of art — geographically, generationally, materially — in his writings and exhibitions over the past several years.” He added: “Importantly, I first started hearing about him from artists who found in him a sympathetic and intelligent translator of their projects, and that kind of endorsement is very important to us.”
