Elizabeth Armstrong

Elizabeth Armstrong is an American curator of contemporary and modern art. Beginning in the late 1980s, she served in chief curatorial and leadership roles at the Walker Art Center, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA), Minneapolis Institute of Arts and Palm Springs Art Museum. She has organized numerous touring exhibitions and catalogues that gained national and international attention; among the best known are: "In the Spirit of Fluxus" (Walker, 1993), "Ultrabaroque: Aspects of Post-Latin American Art" (San Diego, 2000), and "Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury" (OCMA, 2007). She is also known for organizing three California Biennials (2002–6) and notable exhibitions of David Reed and Mary Heilmann (the artist's first retrospective). Armstrong's curatorial work and publications have been recognized by the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Center for Curatorial Leadership, the Getty Foundation Pacific Standard Time project and the National Endowment for the Arts, among other organizations.

Education and career Armstrong was born in Winchester, Massachusetts. She enrolled at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts intending to be an artist, but transitioned to art history and cultural studies, earning a BA in American Studies in 1974. After graduating, she worked as a grants administrator at the National Endowment for the Humanities (1976–9) before entering graduate school at the University of California Berkeley to earn an MA in the History of Art in 1982. An essay based on the subject of her master's thesis, "American Scene as Satire, the Art of Paul Cadmus in the 1930s," appeared in Arts Magazine in March 1982.

She was hired by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis as an assistant curator in 1983, taking over as curator from 1989–1996. She was hired as senior curator by the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego in 1996, and organized twelve exhibitions there, including four touring shows with major publications. Armstrong joined the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA) in Newport Beach in 2001 as deputy director for programs and chief curator, serving until 2008; she served as interim director in 2001–2.

Curatorial work Armstrong's curatorial work and leadership has been recognized for guiding contemporary museums through change, growth and a rethinking of their cultural roles in relation to local communities, new audiences and the wider art world. During her Walker tenure, Armstrong also mounted exhibitions of Marcel Duchamp, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Ann Hamilton and David Ireland, Robert Motherwell, Claes Oldenburg, and area photographer Paul Shambroom.

Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego During Armstrong's tenure at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (MCASD), she organized several notable exhibitions with an increasingly cosmopolitan focus. "Ultrabaroque: Aspects of Post-Latin American Art" (2000, curated with Victor Zamudio-Taylor) featured 80 diverse works made in the prior decade years by sixteen, far-flung, mainly younger artists (e.g., Miguel Calderón, Maria Fernanda Cardoso, Adriana Varejão, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle). Critics described the show as ambitious, compelling and provocative in its challenge to misperceptions and stereotypes that prevented American audiences from understanding Latin American art's range and sophistication.

The earlier exhibition, "David Reed Paintings: Motion Pictures" (1998), offered what critic Christopher Knight termed "an engaging, well-selected survey" of Reed’s work since the mid-1970s, including 40 canvases and five installations featuring video clips of classic film scenes (e.g., from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo) in which his paintings were slipped into the décor. including the successful recasting of its California Biennials of emerging artists from throughout the state and an expansion of its international contemporary art collection. Critic David Pagel praised the 2002 biennial for its use of humor; In 2006, OCMA offered a sprawling, cosmopolitan biennial organized under six loose themes that Artforum wrote, broke from prevailing trends or labels for a "breath of fresh West Coast air."

Armstrong's OCMA shows that traveled widely included "Girls' Night Out" (2003), which presented two generations of groundbreaking photography, video and performance by women taking more evocative and poetic approaches to female identity, and "Villa America: American Moderns, 1900-1950" (2005), which drew on the extensive private collection of Minneapolis businessman Myron Kunin to explore the evolution of early American modernism in relation to French art and popular culture. The latter exhibition was the first museum show devoted to Kunin's collection, which Armstrong became familiar with while at the Walker; it presented an eclectic mix of well-known (Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O'Keeffe) and more obscure artists, such as Peter Blume, Jared French, Morton Schamberg and Paul Tchelitchew. "Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design and Culture at Midcentury" (2007) cast a wide conceptual net, surveying the post-World War II, progressive cultural zeitgeist in Southern California through more than 150 objects, including Ray and Charles Eames designs, architectural photographs by Julius Shulman, and works by under-recognized California hard-edge painters. It was praised for its informed installation design, painting gallery, and an award-winning catalogue that design writer Steven Heller called an integrated, consistent history examining every facet of popular art for how it "expressed California’s cultural aura" during an era where it eclipsed New York City as a zone of experimentation. The Atlantic'''s Benjamin Schwarz termed it an "unusually intelligent and lavishly illustrated" book, the first to connect the various artistic forms that Southern California modernism took and to "provocatively suggest that a common sensibility animated all those forms."

Minneapolis Institute of Arts (Mia) and Palm Springs Art Museum At Mia, Armstrong took on the challenge of integrating contemporary curatorial strategies into an encyclopedic museum with broader historical/cultural collections and audiences than her previous museums.

Awards and recognition Armstrong has been awarded curatorial fellowships from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (2010), the Center for Curatorial Leadership (2007–8), and the National Endowment for the Arts (1989); Her OCMA exhibition "Birth of the Cool" won an Art to Life Curatorial Award from Art and Living Magazine in 2008, and her Walker show, "Peter Fischli and David Weiss" won an International Association of Art Critics special exhibition award in 1998. Her catalogues that have been recognized with awards include Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury (American Association of Museum Curators prize for best exhibition catalogue, 2007) and In the Spirit of Fluxus (International Association of Art Critics Award, 1994–5). Mary Heilmann: To Be Someone (2007) Villa America: American Moderns, 1900-1950 (2005) Girls' Night Out (2003) David Reed Paintings: Motion Pictures (1998) Peter Fischli and David Weiss: In a Restless World (1996) Jasper Johns: Printed Symbols (1990) First Impressions: Early Prints by Forty-Six Contemporary Artists (1989) Tyler Graphics, the Extended Image'' (1987)