SOFIA DADOURIAN
The Menil Collection announced today that Reem Fadda has won the Houston museum’s Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement. As part of the award, which is given biennially to mid-career curators, Fadda will get a $20,000 stipend. She will also give a lecture at the Menil Collection in the fall.
From 2010 to 2016, Fadda was the associate curator of Middle Eastern art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation’s Abu Dhabi Project. She has also held positions at the Palestinian Association for Contemporary Art and the International Academy of Art Palestine, and she has curated shows for the Venice Biennale and the Queens Museum. On September 1, Fadda will open an exhibition she curated for the Palestinian Museum in Ramallah.
Past winners of the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement, which is named for the Menil Collection’s founding director and Ferus Gallery’s cofounder, include Documenta 14’s Adam Szymczyk, the Museum of Modern Art’s Thomas J. Lax, and LAXART’s Hamza Walker.
“Reem makes a political framework a throughline in her vision, and it’s been instrumental in both her temporary exhibitions and in the permanent institutions she’s helped launch,” Phong Bui, the cofounder of the Brooklyn Rail and one of the award’s jurors, said in a statement. “Her observation that the Third World has not yet been thoroughly anesthetized by the forces of globalization and colonization is prescient, and points to how much we all can learn from its artists.”