Since December 1, 2009, SCOTT ROTHKOPF is Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
Scott Rothkopf comes to the Whitney from Artforum, where he has been Senior Editor since January 2004. During his time at the magazine he has been intimately involved in planning its editorial direction and has worked closely with many distinguished writers and artists on essays, projects, and special issues. He was a guest curator at Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum, where he organized Mel Bochner Photographs 1966-1969 (2002), a survey of Bochner’s photographic works and related drawings, which traveled to the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. At the Fogg, Rothkopf was also co-curator, with Linda Norden, of Pierre Huyghe’s This Is Not a Time for Dreaming (2004), a site-specific installation, performance, and film made by Huyghe in response to Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. The work has been exhibited internationally at venues including Tate Modern, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, where it has entered the permanent collection of the Musée national d’art moderne. Scott Rothkopf was a contributing curator of the 2007 Lyon Biennial, for which he selected and installed the work of Wade Guyton.
“I’m delighted to join the Whitney and its distinguished curatorial team at this pivotal moment for the museum,” said Scott Rothkopf. “The Whitney has long been a venturesome advocate for contemporary artists and an imaginative steward of a rich historical collection. I look forward to advancing that dual mission and to exploring new approaches to our understanding of art in the United States within a broader international context.”
As a frequent contributor to Artforum, Scott Rothkopf has written on exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial, and on topics ranging from the art and architectural criticism of the 1980s to the writings of 1960s critic Gene Swenson. His texts for the magazine have addressed the work of Ed Ruscha, Sol LeWitt, Paul Chan, Carroll Dunham, Josiah McElheny, T. J. Willcox, Katharina Fritsch, Richard Aldrich, Diller & Scofidio, Francesco Vezzoli, and Karen Kilimnik, who was the subject of his 2007 book, Period Eye: Karen Kilimnik’s Fancy Pictures, co-authored with Meredith Martin. Scott Rothkopf’s museum and gallery catalogue contributions include essays on Jeff Koons, Wade Guyton, Eva Hesse, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Kelley Walker, Terry Winters, and Takashi Murakami, as well as interviews with James Rosenquist and Laura Owens, for, among others, Tate Modern, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Kunsthalle Zürich, the Kunstverein in Hamburg, Le Magasin, Grenoble, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In addition to writing for the catalogue of Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, on view at the Whitney from November 6, 2009, through January 24, 2010, Scott Rothkopf is contributing to a book on Paul Thek, which will accompany the Whitney’s retrospective in the fall of 2010.
Scott Rothkopf has served as a visiting critic at the Yale University School of Art and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and has participated in numerous public lectures and panels, as well as having organized and chaired “Photography and Conceptual Art” with Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, and Jan Dibbets at Harvard University, and “Transatlantic,” a College Art Association session devoted to the interchange between American and European artists in the 1960s and ’70s. He received his undergraduate and masters degrees in the history of art and architecture from Harvard University, for which he is completing his Ph.D. on the work of Jeff Koons and the art of the 1980s .
