The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) has named Valerie Cassel Oliver, the curator of an acclaimed survey about sound and Southern culture, as the 2022 recipient of its Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence. The prize, which goes to one curator annually, comes with a $25,000 purse.
“Valerie Cassel Oliver should be considered one of America’s great ‘thought leaders,’ a curator who constantly surprises, enlightens, and broadens the scope of art,” said Tom Eccles, executive director of CCS Bard, in a statement.
Cassel Oliver joined the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts as a curator of modern and contemporary art in 2017. With Naomi Beckwith, she organized an acclaimed Howardena Pindell survey that showed at the VMFA in 2018. The following year, she staged a survey of works that the VMFA had acquired from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. Her most recent exhibition, “The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse” (2021–), positioned the South as the linchpin of American art and culture. That survey is currently traveling to venues across the country.
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Prior to joining the VMFA, from 2000 to 2017, Cassel Oliver was senior curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in Texas, where she organized exhibitions including the acclaimed “Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970 (2005) and “Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art” (2012). She also organized surveys devoted to Donald Moffett, Trenton Doyle Hancock, and Angel Otero.
“It is deeply humbling to be acknowledged for my work. I feel it is necessary work, created from a space of commitment and passion. And, I have been quite fortunate over the years to bring ideas to the fore and to celebrate amazing artists and their work,” Cassel Oliver said in a statement. “It is immensely gratifying to be acknowledged especially by CCS Bard because of its role in sustaining the viability of curatorial practice,” she added.