Jarrett Gregory Heads to the Hirshhorn Museum as Curator

Gregory has overseen shows of artists like Pierre Huyghe and Stephen Prina.

Jarrett Gregory. Courtesy of Museum Associates/Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Fresh off of organizing the Focus section at this year’s Armory Show, Jarrett Gregory has been tapped as a curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, in Washington, DC. Gregory was previously associate curator of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where she organized exhibitions of artists including Pierre Huyghe and Stephen Prina.

Museum director Melissa Chiu, head of the museum since 2014, has beefed up the curatorial team by naming Gianni Jetzer, formerly of the Swiss Institute in New York, as curator-at-large. She followed that up in early 2015 by hiring Stéphane Aquin away from the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, where he had been curator of contemporary art since 1998, to be chief curator. In December, Chiu brought on Performa’s Mark Beasley as the institution’s first-ever curator of media and performance art.

“We are very pleased to welcome Jarrett as the Hirshhorn’s newest curator,” said Chiu in an announcement of the hire. “We look forward to the experience and expertise she will bring to the Hirshhorn as the national museum of contemporary art.”

Before heading to LACMA, Gregory worked at the New Museum of Contemporary Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York; at the Whitney, she worked on shows of artists such as Urs Fischer, Dorothy Iannone, and Lawrence Weiner.

Internationally, Gregory is also on the advisory board for the Lusanga International Research Centre for Art and Economic Inequality, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It’s a contemporary art museum in development by the Institute for Human Activities, founded by Dutch artist Renzo Martens, who was included in Gregory’s Focus section at the Armory Show.

Part of the Smithsonian, the Hirshhorn features a collection of nearly 12,000 works in various mediums, focused on postwar American and European art. Currently on view is “Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors,” which drew some 14,000 visitors during its debut week.


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