Boston’s ICA Recruits New Top Curator From New York’s MoMA

Eva Respini, a photography curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, has been named the new chief curator at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, the museum has announced. She is expected to begin work here in March 2015, filling the shoes of Helen Molesworth, who left earlier this year to become chief curator at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

During her 15 years at New York’s MoMA, Respini curated retrospectives of Cindy Sherman and Robert Heinecken as well as exhibitions of Klara Liden, Anne Collier, Leslie Hewitt and Akram Zaatari. She also organized the thematic exhibitions “Pictures by Women,” a photographic history of women artists, and “Staging Action: Photography and Performance since 1960.”

“Eva Respini brings a combination of scholarship and a 21st-century sensibility to image-making, technology, and the role of the museum of the future,” ICA Director Jill Medvedow said in a prepared statement. “She offers a rich understanding of contemporary art and is a creative and intelligent leader in her field. We look forward to the contributions that she will bring to the museum.”

"It is a tremendous honor to join Jill Medvedow and the team at the ICA in Boston,” Respini said in a prepared statement. “The ICA is an institution that I have long admired for its leadership in the contemporary art field and innovative programming in a dynamic building. I am eager to build on the ICA’s strength and continue to engage with artists who are shaping and defining art across the globe. … I think the curatorial landscape in Boston is in transition—with the newly opened Harvard Museums, the relatively new team at MIT’s List Visual Art Center and the MFA’s modern and contemporary wing—and I look forward to being a part of that.”