ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.-The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College will present its eighth annual Award for Curatorial Excellence to Kathy Halbreich, director of the Walker Art Center, and Mari Carmen Ramírez, Wortham Curator of Latin American Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, at a gala dinner on Tuesday, April 5, in New York City. Vishakha N. Desai, president of the Asia Society, and Lowery Stokes Sims, director of the Studio Museum of Harlem, will present the awards. The event will begin at 6:30 p.m. with cocktails, followed by dinner at 7:30 p.m., at Landmark on the Park, 160 Central Park West (corner of 76th Street) in New York City.

The annual gala event raises scholarship funds for the Center's graduate program, considered the leading master's degree program in the United States dedicated to training curators and critics of contemporary art.

Kathy Halbreich has been director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis since 1991. She was founding curator of the Department of Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (1988-90) and director of the Albert and Vera List Visual Arts Center at MIT (1976-86). She has curated or co-curated numerous exhibitions, including Against Nature: Contemporary Japanese Art (1989), Culture and Commentary: An Eighties Perspective (1990), and Bruce Nauman (1993). She was curatorial consultant for the 1988 Carnegie International and North American commissioner for the first Kwangju Biennale (1995).

Mari Carmen Ramírez is the Wortham Curator of Latin American Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Previously, she was curator of Latin American art at the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin (1989-2000) and director of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Puerto Rico (1985-88). She was curator or co-curator of The School of the South: El Taller Torres-Garcia and Its Legacy (1991), Re-Aligning Vision: Alternative Currents in South American Drawing (1997), Cantos Paralelos: Visual Parody in Contemporary Argentinean Art (1998), and Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America (2004), among other exhibitions.

The Award for Curatorial Excellence honors signal contributions to exhibition practice and the development of the profession of curating. Past recipients of the award include Harald Szeemann (1998), Marcia Tucker (1999), Kasper König (2000), Paul Schimmel (2001), Susanne Ghez (2002), Kynaston McShine (2003), and Walter Hopps (2004). The Center's gala dinner provides support for student scholarships and the student exhibition program at the Center for Curatorial Studies.

In the Center's graduate program, students pursue an intensive course of study in the history and criticism of the contemporary visual arts and the practices of exhibition. Students in the first year of study organize exhibitions together. During the second year of study, each student presents an exhibition or a series of critical or scholarly essays as a final master's degree project. Center graduates are now working in arts institutions in New York, Philadelphia, Houston, Los Angeles, Toronto, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Turin, Kiev, and other cities throughout the United States and abroad.