October 3, 2005

MASS MoCA Announces Curatorial Appointments

Susan Cross and Nato Thompson are new Curators

(North Adams, Mass.) MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art), the largest center for contemporary visual and performing arts in the country has appointed Susan Cross to the position of curator. In addition, MASS MoCA has promoted to curator former associate curator Nato Thompson who has been with MASS MoCA since 2001. Cross comes to MASS MoCA with 15 years' experience in the field, including 10 years at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Together with MASS MoCA director Joseph Thompson, Cross and Thompson will program approximately six exhibitions per year which fill the institution's 120,000 square feet of gallery space.

"Nato and Susan are both deeply committed to helping artists realize new work, which is at the very core of MASS MoCA's mission," said Joseph Thompson. "Open for just six years, MASS MoCA has birthed, fabricated, and willed into existence over 70 major, large-scale works of visual art in the course of organizing some 40 exhibitions. Our commitment to making new art possible extends to the field of performing arts as well, in which we have shaped over 30 new works. Nato and Susan join a larger creative, fabrication, and production team that includes Rachel Chanoff, Laurie Cearley, Richard Criddle, and Sue Killam - a group of people that together have made MASS MoCA among the most fertile sites in the nation for the creation of new work in all media."

"MASS MoCA has infused the region as well as an international audience with a palpable sense of excitement about art and the endless, new possibilities this raw building complex seems to inspire in the creative mind," said Cross. "I'm thrilled to be working with an institution and a group of people so devoted to contemporary art. And I am looking forward to facilitating its mission, as well as shaping a much-needed platform for lesser-known and younger artists."

Nato Thompson commented, "It is no secret I think MASS MoCA is the best museum in the country. I'm very proud to be a member of this amazing team."

A graduate of the Williams College Graduate Program in Art History at the Clark, Cross returns to the Berkshires after ten years in New York where she most recently organized The Eye of the Storm: works in situ by Daniel Buren at the Guggenheim Museum. In recent years she has curated Bruce Nauman: Theaters of Experience for Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, and The Hugo Boss Prize 2002: Pierre Huyghe.

Cross has edited and authored numerous publications, including The Buren Times and Bruce Nauman: Theaters of Experience, and Changing Perceptions: The Panza Collection at the Guggenheim Museum. She served as juror for the Guggenheim's prestigious Hugo Boss Prize for Contemporary Art in 2004 and has been on the screening committee for the Hamptons International Film Festival for the past four years. Working with the Guggenheim Young Collectors committee, Cross has supported the work of numerous young artists, including Stephen Dean, Spencer Finch, Koo Jeong-a, Jonathan Monk, Rivane Neuenschwander, and Robin Rhode. Cross earned her BA from the University of Virginia. Her first project at MASS MoCA will be to oversee the installation of House of Oracles, the massive Huang Yong Ping retrospective which opens at MASS MoCA on March 18, 2006.

Currently working on an exhibition entitled Ahistoric Occasion featuring works by Jeremy Deller, Yinka Shonibare, Dario Robleto, Paul Chan, and Allison Smith, Nato Thompson has been responsible for several major exhibitions and commissions at MASS MoCA including Becoming Animal: Contemporary Art in the Animal Kingdom and last year's group exhibition The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere. Major works commissioned for Thompson's shows include Mark Dion's Library for the Birds of Massachusetts and Ann-Sofi Siden's QM Museum for Becoming Animal and six new works for The Interventionists. Thompson is the author of exhibition catalogs for The Interventionists (for which he received the College Art Association Art Journal Award for Distinguished Writing in 2005) and Becoming Animal. Both catalogs are distributed by MIT Press.

Thompson has been involved in many community organizations as a volunteer since relocating to North Adams from Chicago in 2001 including serving as the chairman of the board for the Contemporary Artists Center for two years. He advises several national and international arts organizations including Creative Capital, Art in General, and the Vera List Center for Art and Activism, and writes for numerous periodicals including tema celeste, Parkett, Piet Zwart, Art Journal, and the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. Thompson is a graduate of UC Berkeley and received an MA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

For Immediate Release
Contact: Katherine Myers
(413) 664-4481 x8113
katherine@massmoca.org