Mexico City-based independent curator Cuauhtémoc Medina has won the biennial Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement. The award recognizes early to midcareer contemporary art curators and confers a stipend of $15,000.
Most recently, Medina was head curator of the ninth Manifesta biennial, “The Deep of the Modern” (2012), in Genk, Belgium, and has organized numerous other exhibitions internationally, including solo projects and group shows. He has been a full-time researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas at the National Autonomous University of Mexico since 1992, and he worked as an associate curator of Latin American art at London’s Tate Modern from 2002 to 2008. He holds a PhD in the history and theory of art from the University of Essex in Britain.
Medina was selected by a jury including the Menil’s curator of modern and contemporary art, Toby Kamps; Russell Ferguson, professor and chair of the art department at the University of California, Los Angeles; Elisabeth Sussman, curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Ulrich Loock, a Berlin-based independent curator.
The award was established in 2001 in honor of Walter Hopps (1932-2005), founding director of the Menil Collection, Houston, Tex. Previous recipients include Eungie Joo and Roger M. Buergel.
