Charles Esche has received the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College‘s (CCS Bard) annual award for curatorial excellence. Esche currently serves as the director of Eindhoven’s Van Abbemuseum, and as co-director of London-based publisher Afterall Publishing, which he co-founded in 1998 with Mark Lewis Central Saint Martins. Esche’s award will be bestowed upon him on April 2 by another excellent curator, 2015 New Museum Triennial curator Lauren Cornell, during a gala dinner celebration at Capitale in New York.

Among Esche’s other extra-curricular activities is the L’Internationale confederation, a coalition of seven museums stretching from Madrid to Istanbul that plans to open a pan-European museum devoted to modern and contemporary art by 2017. He is also a co-curator of this year’s São Paulo Bienal, sharing curatorial duties with Galit Eilat, Pablo Lafuente, Nuria Enguita Mayo, and Oren Sagiv. In the past he has co-curated the Istanbul Biennial (in 2005 with Vasif Kortun, November Paynter, and Esra Sarigedik), the Gwangju Biennale (in 2002, with Hou Hanru and Song Wan Kyung), and the Tate Triennial (in 2000, with Virginia Button).

Past recipients of the Lawrence Weiner-designed CCS Bard award for curatorial excellence include Marcia Tucker (in 1999), Paul Schimmel (in 2001), Alanna Heiss (in 2007), Lucy Lippard (in 2010), Helen Molesworth and Hans Ulrich Obrist (in 2011), and Elisabeth Sussman (in 2013).

Benjamin Sutton