On the eve of its Eighth International Biennial, The Dissolve, SITE Santa Fe announced that Irene Hofmann has been named Phillips Director and Chief Curator, effective October 1, 2010.
The appointment was ratified at a meeting of SITE Santa Fe Board of Directors held on June 8, 2010.
Ms. Hofmann succeeds Laura Steward, who became Director of SITE Santa Fe in 2005 and in September 2009 announced that she would be stepping down following the opening of the 2010 International Biennial.
Ms. Hofmann is a curator, exhibition organizer, writer, arts administrator, and museum director. She served as Executive Director of the Contemporary Museum, in Baltimore, from 2005 to 2010, where she established an invigorated programming schedule of new art, new ideas and new creative processes.
Most recently, she curated Bearing Witness, a multi-venue survey of the artist duo Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry. She also curated Cell Phone, the first museum survey of artworks created using cell phone technologies; St. Cecilia, a new commission and national touring exhibition of works by Chicago-based artist Joseph Grigely; Broadcast, a large-scale exhibition and national tour that explored artistic interventions into broadcast radio and television; and Cottage Industry, an exhibition that explored the artist as entrepreneur.
In addition, Ms. Hofmann produced major exhibitions, residencies, and new commissions by artists such as Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Rineke Dijkstra, Fritz Haeg, Dawoud Bey, Christine Hill, Ruben Ochoa, Futurefarmers, Mads Lynnerup, Gregory Green, Marjetica Potrc, and Lisa Anne Auerbach.
Also while at the Contemporary Museum, she introduced best practices, drafted bylaws and conflict of interest policies, set a board dues structure, and motivated the board to develop fundraising initiatives.
From 2001 to 2005, Ms. Hofmann was curator of the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, CA, where she co-organized the 2002 and 2004 California Biennial and the national touring exhibition, Girls’ Night Out, which featured work by a new generation of women photographers and video artists. Some of her other projects at OCMA include developing The Orange Lounge, an off-site new media gallery, and curating the first United States museum exhibitions of work by Swiss artist Fabrice Gygi and by Berlin-based artist Jason Dodge.