CARNEGIE MUSEUM NAMES PHOTOGRAPHY CURATOR; ATHENS BIENNALE CURATORS ANNOUNCED

A curatorial department of photography has been established at the Carnegie Museum of Art, notes Flash Art_. The Pittsburgh institution announced yesterday its new department and the appointment of Linda Benedict-Jones as its chief curator. Benedict-Jones, executive director of Silver Eye Center for Photography since 1999, will undertake the position at Carnegie Museum of Art starting December 15. Richard Armstrong, the director at Carnegie Museum of Art, highlighted Benedict-Jones’s outstanding experience and “discerning acquaintance with photography.” The main tasks of Benedict-Jones will be to supervise the museum’s collection (approximately forty-five hundred pieces) and organize the exhibitions and acquisitions. The first show is scheduled to open in summer 2009. Benedict-Jones will also plan a traveling photography exhibition together with guest curator Howard Bossen.

In other news, artistic directors XYZ, who curated the first Athens Biennale 2007, “Destroy Athens,” have invited an eclectic group of curators to contemplate the subject of heaven for the second Athens Biennale. The 2009 team of curators will retain their autonomy, while interconnecting creatively and claiming a narrative cohesion which will be further reflected in the exhibition design, by architect and artist Andreas Angelidakis. The multiple visual-art and performative interventions in the public spaces will be curated by Dimitris Papaioannou and Zafos Xagoraris. Exhibitions, installations, public interventions, screening programs, and symposia will be curated by Nadja Argyropoulou, Diana Baldon, Christopher Marinos, Chus Martínez, and Cay Sophie Rabinowitz.