Yasmil Raymond joined the acclaimed Dia Art Foundation as its curator in May 2009, after serving as associate curator of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis for five years. Dia is an innovative non-profit art institution which initiates and supports new projects, as well as presenting and preserving important works. Raymond is responsible for Dia’s exhibitions, as well as for education, public programs and publications. She is currently developing an exhibition of work by Koo Jeong-A; plans for other artists include Jean-Luc Moulene, Franz Erhard Walther, and Robert Whitman. At the Walker, Raymond co-curated several seminal exhibitions, most recently, with Philippe Vergne, "Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love", which premiered there and won the 2008 award for the “Best Monographic Museum Show Nationally” from the International Association of Art Critics. (Vergne, who was deputy director of the Walker, is now the director of Dia). From 1999-2002 she was a member of the education department at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
Yasmil Raymond stayed at the JCVA for a week at the end of May 2010. In the course of a very dense visit, she met with over twenty artists with whom she held unusually in-depth conversations. In a discussion of the visit, she noted the uniqueness of JCVA’s art of hospitality, which situates artists as citizens of their community and permits poignant meetings in natural and fluid situations. While curators’ international visits often suffer from superficiality, Raymond said, this residency offered a rich sense of the artists’ context, and an insistently human, non-bureaucratic dialogue. She described the JCVA’s practice as one of curating the meeting between local and international art figures, making such contact truly meaningful; every city should have one (a program like the JCVA), was one of her conclusions.
Despite the hectic schedule, Raymond also offered a powerful lecture at the MFA program of the Bezalel Academy in Tel Aviv, where she reviewed Dia Foundation’s commissioning and collecting history as well as current projects. This lecture was her last gift to Tel Aviv for this round; she proceeded from there directly to the airport.
