Ghez receives grant for upcoming shows

Susanne Ghez, Executive Director of the Renaissance Society, has received a 1996 Curator's Grant from the Peter Norton Family Foundation. The grant will provide $50,000 in exhibition support for the 1996-97 academic year.

Grant recipients are selected on the basis of exhibition history and personal curatorial vision. During Ghez's 22-year tenure, the Renaissance Society has achieved international recognition for its rotating exhibitions and accompanying lectures and publications. A list of artists who have shown at the Renaissance Society under Ghez's direction "reads like a Who's Who of contemporary European and American art," according to a release issued by the Norton Family Foundation. Recent exhibitions include solo shows by Stan Douglas, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Rodney Graham, Albert Oehlen and Diana Thater, as well as such group shows as "persona" and "After and Before."

"I knew when I came here that we had to focus more than ever on the vanguard and really make that our specialty, our strength, our forte. We decided we would only show the work of living artists, and we would strive to maintain an international connection," Ghez said in a 1994 interview about the Renaissance Society's 75th anniversary. "It's very important to think of the Renaissance Society as a laboratory. If science is any model, then we ought to be experimenting even more. We should take more risks."

The Renaissance Society plans to mount five shows during the 1996-97 academic year, including exhibitions of the work of Chicago architect Ben Nicholson and artists Kim Dingle, Kathleen Schimert and Giovanni Anselmo.

The Renaissance Society has been at the forefront of contemporary art for nearly eight decades and has consistently shown works by artists whose names later became household words, including Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Georgia O'Keeffe, Marc Chagall, Andy Warhol, Ed Paschke and Robert Mapplethorpe.