AICA-USA Lecture

Writer and curator Valerie Cassel Oliver delivers the seventeenth annual AICA-USA Distinguished Critic Lecture, presented in partnership with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School. Cassel Oliver discusses her curatorial practice through a series of defining exhibitions that refute monolithic framings of Black art and artists.

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. Videos of previous lectures can be found here.

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), which toured nationally, and the exhibition Dawoud Bey: Elegy (2023), which 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.