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Claremont, CA—The Benton Museum of Art at ɫ��ɫ is pleased to announce the appointment of Solveig Nelson as the museum’s new curator of photography and new media. Nelson is currently an American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Art History at Dartmouth College. She will begin consulting with the Benton on upcoming projects while she completes this fellowship and will then join the museum full time in August 2024.

“I’m thrilled that Solveig will help us shape a vision for the further development of our photography and new media collections, the largest areas in our overall holdings,” said Victoria Sancho Lobis, Sarah Rempel and Herbert S. Rempel ’23 Director of the museum. “With more than 8,000 photographs in our collection—many of them significant gifts—we have recognized an urgent need for more dedicated stewardship to integrate these works into exhibition projects and teaching efforts. Solveig’s breadth of experience, deep knowledge of photographic and filmmaking techniques, and consummate poise as a collaborator will undoubtedly contribute to the Benton’s overall mission and institutional profile.”

Nelson, who received her PhD in art history from the University of Chicago, is a curator, scholar, and art critic who specializes in the intersections among video, photography, and social movements. She has co-curated multiple exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago— including Subscribe: Artists and Alternative Magazines, 1970­–1995; the Chicago iteration of Gregg Bordowitz: I Wanna Be Well, and Vaginal Davis: The White to Be Angry—and also spent nine years curating events for several esteemed Chicago literary organizations with authors such as Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Edward Said, and Susan Sontag. She has held positions as the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Time-Based Media at the Art Institute of Chicago and as a Fellow in the Department of Photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she curated the permanent collection rotation Photographs as Communication.

Nelson also received an Andy Warhol Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant and has published essays in catalogues devoted to Steve McQueen, Ray Johnson, and David Hartt; she has also authored features and reviews in Artforum since 2012, including pieces on Simone Forti’s holography, Thing magazine, and Gretchen Bender’s Total Recall 1987. Currently working on a monograph about early video art and editing scholarly volumes on artist Gregg Bordowitz and curator Hamza Walker, Nelson has additionally collaborated on time-based media conservation from a curatorial perspective and the social justice history of early video and television art.

“Histories of photography raise important questions about contemporary artists’ practices of making, critiquing, and circulating images,” said Nelson. “As a curator and critic, I aim to utilize archival and object-based research to center perspectives that have been treated as if marginal to art history. It is an honor to be able to pursue such research with the collection of the Benton and to collaborate with such exceptional colleagues, faculty, and students. I look forward to working closely with artists and the ɫ��ɫ community to develop new projects that activate the Benton’s site and collections in thought-provoking ways.”

After Nelson completes her fellowship at Dartmouth College, she will join the Benton for its annual AllPaper Seminar, a program for emerging professionals, in June and will then begin her appointment full-time in mid-August.

About the Benton Museum of Art at ɫ��ɫ

Housed in a purpose-built facility designed by Machado Silvetti and Gensler, the Benton Museum of Art at ɫ��ɫ explores the role of museums in society through creative collaborations with students, faculty, and community partners. The museum serves as a steward for nearly 20,000 objects, with particularly deep representation in the history of photography, traditional Native American cultural items, early modern European art, and works in various media produced in Southern California in the twentieth century. In keeping with ɫ��ɫ’s reputation as a leading center of the visual arts, the collection also includes works by such esteemed alumni as Chris Burden ’69, Marcia Hafif ’51, Helen Pashgian ’56, Peter Shelton ’73, and James Turrell ’65. As a teaching museum, the Benton offers an average of ten exhibitions and more than 100 programs per year while encouraging active learning and intellectual exploration across all disciplines of study within the liberal arts context.