Lauren Cornell


Lauren Cornell is an American curator and writer based in New York. Cornell is the Director of the Graduate Program at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and Chief Curator of the Hessel Museum of Art. Previously, she worked at the New Museum for twelve years and was the Executive Director of their affiliate Rhizome.

Biography

Cornell was born and raised in New York City. She started her career in the arts as the Executive Director of Ocularis, a now-closed cinema in Brooklyn, New York. She joined the New Museum in 2005, where she worked on the inaugural Generational show, Younger Than Jesus, and became the Executive Director of Rhizome, an organization that commissions, exhibits, and preserves art engaged with technology. She stepped down from her role at Rhizome in July 2012 to curate the New Museum's third Generational Triennial, Surround Audience, in 2015.
Cornell and Ed Halter co-edited the anthology Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century.
She has contributed to publications including Aperture, Art in America, ArtReview, Frieze, and Mousse, and written on artists for monographic catalogues.
In 2016, Artsy named Cornell one of "The 20 Most Influential Young Curators in the United States." In 2017, Cornell was the recipient of ArtTable's New Leadership Award. In 2017, she was named an Apollo 40 under 40.

Seven on Seven conference

In 2010, Cornell founded Rhizome's Seven on Seven conference, which bridges contemporary art and technology fields by pairing technological innovators with visual artists and challenging them to develop something over the course of a day. Seven on Seven was inspired by Experiments in Art and Technology, a project launched by Billy Klüver and Robert Rauschenberg in 1967, which organized collaborations between artists and engineers at Bell Labs.

Quotes

“It’s important to consistently interrogate what exact freedoms or limitations structure our information environment.”
"Good curators don’t just show established artists or reiterate well-trodden art histories but work to expand, complicate and critique these narratives and open the doors of art to lesser-known or new voices."

Exhibitions