New Museum of Contemporary Art
Senior Curator
1995 - 2006
New York, NY
More than a decade after his Extended Sensibilities (1982-83) pioneered the then-taboo subject of sexual identity and art, the New Museum's founder, Marcia Tucker, named Dan Cameron to be Senior Curator, in effect presiding over the museum's transition from alternative space to full-fledged museum. To signal the visible change in programming, he mounted major retrospective exhibitions of such American artists as Carroll Dunham, Paul McCarthy, Faith Ringgold, Carolee Schneemann, David Wojnarowicz, and Martin Wong, alongside mid-career surveys and special projects by a range of international artists: Bili Bidjocka, Candice Breitz, Maria-Fernanda Cardoso, Wim Delvoye, Eugenio Dittborn, Mona Hatoum, Jose Antonio Hernandez-Diez, Los Carpinteros, Nalini Malani, Cildo Meireles, Aernout Mik, Rivane Neuenschwander, Marcel Odenbach, Pierre at Gilles, Keith Piper, Doris Salcedo, Nedko Solakov, Francesco Vezzoli, William Kentridge and Xu Bing. Two large-scale group exhibitions (listed separately) were also integral to the Cameron decade: Living inside the Grid (2002) and East Village USA (2005).
"I decided to take all of the research and energy that had propelled my independent projects during the prior decade, and bring both local and global concerns together in a program intended to galvanize the New Museum’s desire to expand its exhibitions calendar, its audience and its physical space."
Carolee Schneemann: Up To and Including Her Limits
The first-ever U.S. museum survey of Schneemann’s (1939-2019) work included paintings, drawings, watercolors, constructions, photographs, videos, performance documentation and sculptural installations. Works on view ranged from her 1959 Painting to the 1994 mixed-media installation Mortal Coils, and included the 1963 series Eye Body and the title performance-video installation Up To and Including her Limits. The 68-page catalog includes essays by Dan Cameron, David Levi-Strauss, and Kristine Stiles.
Enclosures: Installations by Teresita Fernandez, Nedko Solakov and Hale Tenger
To coincide with the Schneemann exhibition, three artists whose work is conceived in the form of room-scale installations created new projects for the occasion. The Fernandez work was a room in the form of an indoor swimming pool, the Solakov a wallpapered parlor covered in half-hidden graffiti, while Tenger produced an ambiguous waiting area where a rolled-up rug suggested that the most recent occupant was hidden inside.
Remota: Airmail Paintings by Eugenio Dittborn
(in collaboration with the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago de Chile)
At the height of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, Eugenio Dittborn (b. 1943) began to produce works that would circumvent both the state censors as well as the cultural boycott imposed on Chile from the outside. Produced from imagery whose range included historical engravings, old police photos, drawings by schizophrenics and current mass media, the airmail paintings, once made, were folded and placed in customized envelopes, which were then exhibited alongside the works. The 240-page catalog, designed by Guillermo Feuerhake and Eugenio Dittborn, contains essays by Dan Cameron, Guy Brett, Sean Cubitt, Gonzalo Munoz, Gerardo Mosquera, Robert Merino and Adriana Valdes.
Unland/Doris Salcedo
(in collaboration with SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico)
This exhibition, which inaugurated the New Museum’s expanded second-story galleries at its 583 Broadway address, was the result of a three-year collaboration after the artist responded positively to an invitation to produce a new body of work for the museum. Since the early 1990s, Salcedo’s (b. 1958) work had been increasingly focused on the violence then endemic in Colombia, where she lives and works. Unland consisted of three lengthy tables that had been ingeniously threaded with thousands of individual human hairs, producing an almost imperceptible effect of loss and absence. The 80-page exhibition catalog, designed by Paul Carlos, contains essays by Charles Mereweather and Dan Cameron.
Sweet Oblivion: The Urban Landscape of Martin Wong
(in collaboration with Illinois State University Galleries, Normal, IL)
Painter Martin Wong (1946-1999) was born in San Francisco to parents from Hong Kong. He studied ceramics and joined the drag troupe Angels of Light before moving to NYC in the early 1980s to become a painter. Wong's politically charged, highly personal depictions of his neighbors, empty lots, graffiti-covered walls and tales relayed by his neighbor, playwright and former convict Miquel Piñero, soon became timeless depictions of a New York on the brink of profound economic and demographic changes. The 86-page catalog, co-published by Rizzoli, contains essays by Barry Blinderman (co-curator), Lydia Yee, Carlo McCormick, Yasmin Ramirez and Marcia Tucker.