NEW YORK, NY.- The Whitney Museum of American Art announced today that curator Scott Rothkopf has been appointed to the newly created post of Curator and Associate Director of Programs. Working closely with Donna De Salvo, the Museums Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Programs, Rothkopf will help advance programming strategy, collection development, and interdepartmental initiatives as the Whitney prepares to move to its new building downtown in 2015. He will also continue in his role as curator.
De Salvo noted: "Im delighted that Scott will be working with meand with our extraordinary curatorial teamin his new role. We created this position at a transformational moment in the Museums history to help us meet the challenges ahead. Three years ago we welcomed Scott as one of the most important emerging voices in the field. He has made enormous contributions to the Museum as a curator and demonstrated a talent for the kind of broad and strategic thinking that will be invaluable to the team as we chart the Whitneys future."
Since joining the Whitneys staff as curator in December 2009, Mr. Rothkopf has organized several critically acclaimed exhibitions, including Wade Guyton OS and Sinister Pop (co-curated with De Salvo), both currently on view. Previously he organized Glenn Ligon: AMERICA, which traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and Singular Visions (co-curated with Dana Miller), a selection of highlights from the Museums postwar holdings. His next exhibition will be the most comprehensive retrospective to date of the work of Jeff Koons; it debuts in 2014 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, before coming to the Whitney, where it will fill nearly the entire Breuer building. It will also travel to the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Rothkopf previously served as a guest curator at Harvards Fogg Art Museum, where in 2004 he co-organized This Is Not a Time for Dreaming (with Linda Norden) and was also curator of the 2002 exhibition Mel Bochner Photographs, 19661969, which traveled to the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. From 2004 through 2009, Rothkopf was a senior editor of Artforum International. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in art history from Harvard University.