May 2009
Joe Scanlan has been selected as the new director of the Program in Visual Arts in the University's Lewis Center for the Arts. The internationally renowned artist is a sculptor and installation artist who has been an associate professor in the Yale University School of Art.
Scanlan's appointment demonstrates Princeton's expanded commitment to embrace the creative and performing arts as an essential part of its educational mission, according to Paul Muldoon, chair of the Lewis Center . In 2006, President Shirley M. Tilghman launched an arts initiative to increase and enhance programs in the creative and performing arts, and to establish the University as a global leader in the quality of its offerings and in their integration into a broader liberal arts education.
"A large part of our energy over the last three years has gone into determining precisely how we should be building our creative and performing arts programs," he said.
"As we thought about the areas that had been underserved, we recognized that visual arts and dance were most in need of attention."
Princeton simultaneously announced the appointment of Susan Marshall, the artistic director of the critically acclaimed Susan Marshall & Company of New York City for the past 23 years, as the first director of the Program in Dance.
A faculty member at Yale since 2001, Scanlan previously served as assistant director of the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, a contemporary art museum specializing in radical, conceptual and installation-based artworks. He has received numerous awards and fellowships from organizations including the Creative Capital Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale. A native of Ohio, he holds a bachelor of fine arts degree from the Columbus College of Art and Design.
"Joe Scanlan is a marvelously changing, and challenging, artist whose engagement with the idea of art and consumption gives him an appropriately consuming worldview," Muldoon said.
"We're excited by the prospect of his leading the visual arts program of the Lewis Center in ways that will reflect not only the time-honored and traditional aspects of making art but the most contemporary and cutting-edge."
Scanlan has presented his work throughout the United States and Europe, mounting 19 solo exhibitions in the past decade. He has shown his work at K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westphalen in Düsseldorf, Germany; Institut d'Art Contemporain in Villeurbanne, France; the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands; the IKON Gallery in Birmingham, England; the Muse um of Contemporary Art in Chicago; and the Muse um Haus Lange in Krefeld, Germany. Scanlan also has participated in biennials in Sydney, Shanghai, Sharjah, the Baltic States and Toulouse, as well as group exhibitions at the Muse um of Modern Art in San Francisco; Documenta IX in Germany; the ICA in London; and the Aperto in Venice.
In addition to his extraordinary exhibition record, Scanlan is equally acclaimed as an art critic and distinguished author who has published more than 50 articles and reviews in leading international periodicals including Artforum, Art issues, Frieze and Parkett.
Scanlan is the holder of U.S. patent no. 6,488,732 for a process of converting postconsumer waste into viable potting soil. The concept premiered with an exhibition of three tons of the material with a shovel planted in the middle of it at the IKON Gallery in Birmingham, England, and currently is in commercial development.
Scanlan's appointment requires the approval of Princeton 's Board of Trustees, which meets June 1 and would be effective July 1, 2009.
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