17th AICA-USA Distinguished Critic Lecture 2023:
Valerie Cassel Oliver | Black Ontology: The Subversive Beauty of Soul

Valerie Cassel Oliver. Photo by Troy Wilkenson, courtesy the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

December 11, 2023
6:30 - 8PM ET
In-person and livestreamed
The New School, the Auditorium at 66 West 12th Street

AICA-USA is pleased to announce that writer and curator Valerie Cassel Oliver will deliver the 17th annual AICA-USA Distinguished Critic Lecture, presented in partnership with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School.

The AICA-USA Distinguished Critic Lecture at The New School is an annual event during which an exemplary writer addresses seminal issues in contemporary art criticism. Previous lecturers have been Siddhartha Mitter, Legacy Russell, Carolina A. Miranda, Courtney J. Martin, Aruna D’Souza, Paul Chaat Smith, Negar Azimi, Naomi Beckwith, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Lucy Lippard, Michelle Kuo, Peter Schjeldahl, Holland Cotter, Roberta Smith, Linda Nochlin, and Michael Brenson.

Valerie Cassel Oliver is the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Prior to her position at the VMFA, she was Senior Curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Over the past two decades, Cassel Oliver has organized numerous exhibitions including the acclaimed Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970 (2005); Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art (2012) and major survey exhibitions for Donald Moffett; Benjamin Patterson, Jennie C. Jones, Angel Otero and Annabeth Rosen.

Her debut at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts was the critically acclaimed retrospective entitled, Howardena Pindell: What Remains to be Seen co organized with Naomi Beckwith (2018). Most recently, she opened the groundbreaking exhibition, The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture and the Sonic Impulse (2021) that toured nationally. She is currently organizing the exhibition, Dawoud Bey: Elegy that looks at the artist’s preoccupation with histories of place. The work includes commissioned photographs of Richmond’s Historic Slave Trail.

Cassel Oliver is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards including a fellowship from the Center of Curatorial Leadership (2009); the High Museum of Art’s David C. Driskell Award (2011); the James A. Porter Book Award from Howard University (2018) as well as the Alain Locke International Arts Award, Detroit Institute of Art; the College Arts Association’s Excellence in Diversity Award; the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; and Brandywine Workshop and Archives’ Lifetime Achievement Award (all 2022).

Cassel Oliver holds an Executive MBA from Columbia University, New York; an M.A. in Art History from Howard University in Washington, D.C. and, a B.S. in Communications from the University of Texas at Austin.