EAST LANSING, MI.- The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University announced the promotion of Steven L. Bridges to Senior Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs. Bridges previously served as Associate Curator.
“Steven’s extraordinary career and professionalism as an art curator have been essential for the scholarly and academic standing of our museum,” said MSU Broad Art Museum Director Mónica Ramírez-Montagut. “He has personally produced over thirty-five exhibitions at the MSU Broad Art Museum with steadfast care, all of exceedingly high integrity, intellectual rigor, and responsiveness to the concerns of our time. I am delighted for this well-deserved promotion and look forward to working closely with Steven in his new leadership role.”
Since joining the MSU Broad Art Museum in November of 2015, Bridges has curated and co-curated several major exhibitions, including Katrín Sigurðardóttir, Oscar Tuazon: Water School, and Michigan Stories: Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw. Currently, Bridges has two major exhibitions currently on view at the museum—he curated Seeds of Resistance and co-curated InterStates of Mind: Rewriting the Map of the United States in the Age of the Automobile. Bridges has also curated solo exhibitions with artists such as Jenny Kendler, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Kathryn Andrews, and Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Phillip Andrew Lewis, as well as exhibitions that feature the museum’s permanent collection, including Andy Warhol: A Day in the Life and Scholar’s Garden.
“Steven’s groundbreaking exhibitions and accompanying academic publications have been held in great esteem by MSU faculty, researchers and students alike, and equally so by local, regional, national, and international audiences,” said Ramírez-Montagut.
Bridges was previously the Curatorial Assistant at the MCA Chicago, where he curated solo exhibitions with artists Faheem Majeed and Jason Lazarus, the latter of which traveled to the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. He also assisted the major retrospective exhibition of the work of Doris Salcedo, which traveled to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Pérez Art Museum Miami. From 2011–15, Bridges co-curated the annual Rapid Pulse International Performance Art Festival in Chicago, which featured live performance art, video screenings, artist lectures and dialogues, and other initiatives aimed at showcasing a wide range of performance-related practices from across the globe. He has published in numerous journals, including Art & the Public Sphere, Live Arts Almanac Vol. 2, Dispatch, and Art & Education Paper, as well as in exhibition catalogues and other online and print media. In 2017 he was named a curatorial fellow at the FACE Foundation, which offers grants to American curators conducting and deepening their research into contemporary art in France.
