Valerie Cassel Oliver

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 where worked from 2000 - 2017.  She has served as director of the Visiting Artist Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1995-2000) and a program specialist at the National Endowment for the Arts (1988-1995).   In 2000 she was one of six curators selected to organize the Biennial for the Whitney Museum of American Art. 

During her tenure at the CAMH, Cassel Oliver organized numerous exhibitions including the acclaimed Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970 (2005); Cinema Remixed & Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image Since 1970 with Dr. Andrea Barnwell Brownlee (2009); a major retrospective on Benjamin Patterson, Born in the State of Flux/us (2010); Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art (2012) and Black in the Abstract, Parts 1 & 2 (2013 and 2014). She has also mounted significant survey exhibitions for Benjamin Patterson, Donald Moffett, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Jennie C. Jones, Angel Otero and Annabeth Rosen.   

Howardena Pindell: What Remains to be Seen organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and with Naomi Beckwith, marked her debut exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.  The exhibition traveled from the MCA Chicago to Richmond and later to the Rose Art Museum at Brandies University.  Cassel Oliver’s most recent exhibition, Cosmologies from the Tree of Life: Art From the African American South opened at the VMFA in June, 2019.  The exhibition features 31 newly acquired works from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation in Atlanta.

Cassel Oliver is the recipient of a Getty Curatorial Research Fellowship (2007); the High Museum of Art’s David C. Driskell Award (2011); the Arthur and Carol Kaufman Goldberg Foundation-to-Life Fellowship at Hunter College (2016) and the James A. Porter Book Award from Howard University (2018). From 2016-17, she was a Senior Fellow in Curatorial Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 

She serves on the editorial board of Callaloo Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters; the advisory for the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia as well as the Smithsonian’s National Archives. She is currently the Editor in Chief for the online artist’s reference dictionary, Benezit, a subsidiary of Oxford University Press.

Cassel Oliver holds a M.A. in art history from Howard University in Washington, D.C. and, B.S. in communications from the University of Texas at Austin.

Articles Related to Valerie Cassel Oliver

2008-10-30

CCL Announces Class of 2009

Selection of New Fellows Builds Upon Success of Inaugural Year Program, Professional Advancement of the Class of 2008 Ten outstanding curators from art museums and institutions across the United States have been selected to participate in the 2009 fellowship program of the Center for Curatorial Leadership (CCL), an organization that trains curators for ... Read More >

2017-06-02

Valerie Cassel Oliver (CCL 2009) Appointed Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the VMFA Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

A warm congratulations to Valerie Cassel Oliver (CCL 2009) on her appointment as Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the VMFA Virginia Museum of Fine Arts! Most recently Senior Curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Valerie completed the CCL fellowship in 2009, which included mentorship ... Read More >

2019-08-23

Rochelle Steiner (CCL 2009) Named Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs and Programs at Palm Springs Art Museum

Rochelle Steiner (CCL 2009) has been named Chief Curator & Director of Curatorial Affairs and Programs at the Palm Springs Art Museum!  Rochelle comes to the Palm Springs Art Museum from the Vancouver Art Gallery, where she serves as the associate director and chief curator. Rochelle has also held posts at the Roski ... Read More >