HOUSTON, TEXAS.- The Menil Collection has announced the winner of the first Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement, a biannual prize established by the Menil in 2001 to recognize early and mid-career accomplishment in the field. The recipient of the prize, which carries a stipend this year of $15,000, is Roger M. Buergel, an independent curator and noted lecturer in visual theory at Luneburge University in Germany. Based in Vienna, he attended the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna; the University of Vienna; and the Free University in Berlin, studying contemporary art, philosophy, economics, and aesthetics. Born in Berlin in 1962, he has organized a number of provocative exhibitions since 1999, including “Painting Between Vulgarity and the Sublime,” a conceptual exhibition on Abstract Expressionism, and “Things We Don’t Understand,” an attempt to redefine the concept of aesthetics. He currently is at work on a series of exhibitions on the subject of government, exploring aesthetic links between peoples’ attempts to organize themselves. 

Recipients of the Hopps Award are invited to Houston to present a lecture on recent curatorial work or a project in progress; the Menil will host a public lecture by Mr. Bruegel on February 18, 2003. 

Working together, Menil chief curator Matthew Drutt and Walter Hopps, adjunct senior curator of twentieth-century art, selected three jurors for the competition: Catherine David, curator, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, and Curator of Documenta X; Richard Flood, chief curator, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Brydon Smith, curator emeritus, National Gallery of Art, Ottowa.

The jurists convened at the Menil in Houston earlier this fall to review nominees put forth by an Advisory and Nominating Committee made up of international museum directors and other arts professionals. Matthew Drutt chaired the jury as a non-voting member; Walter Hopps attended as an observer, also non-voting.

There were 12 candidates this year from Africa, Asia, Europe, South America, and the United States representing all aspects of curatorial practice, including academia, publishing, alternative and independent spaces, and established museums. 

“The jury was unanimous in its selection of Roger Buergel as the first recipient of the Hopps Ward,” said Matthew Drutt. “At a formative stage of his career, his projects are exemplary of the more complex nature of today’s curatorial practice. They successfully locate the theoretical concerns of his academic work within the framework of exhibitions that actively engage audiences and artists in an ongoing critique of how political and aesthetic or cultural interests intersect. In selecting him for this prestigious honor, we hope to underscore a broader view of curatorial activity that this award seeks to support, serving not only those working within museums, but also those whose work carries over into other institutional contexts.”

Walter Hopps, who was founding director of the Menil Collection when the late arts patron Dominique de Menil opened the museum in 1987, began his professional engagement with artists in Los Angeles. He produced a number of legendary exhibitions while curator and director of the Pasadena Art Museum, including, in 1962, the first museum exhibition of Pop Art, “New Painting of Common Objects.” He also organized the first retrospectives of Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell. In 1965 he was Commissioner for the American Pavilion at the Sao Paulo Biennale, which featured works by Barnett New man, Frank Stella, and Robert Irwin. In 1972, as the American Commissioner of the Venice Biennale, he introduced photography to that venue by showing the work of Diane Arbus. In 1997 he organized a Robert Rauschenberg retrospective for the Menil Collection, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (where he also holds the title of adjunct senior curator of twentieth-century art). For the same three institutions he currently is organizing a major retrospective of the work of James Rosenquist. 

"Roger Buergel is one of the most interesting of the younger curators and academics working in Europe today,” said Hopps, “and his selection pleases me greatly."