The Carnegie Museum of Art has named Liz Park as its new Richard Armstrong Curator of Contemporary Art.

Park comes to the museum from the University at Buffalo Art Galleries, State University of New York, where she was curator of exhibitions.

Park has a previous link to the institution in Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood, having served as the associate curator of the Carnegie International, 57th Edition, in 2018.

In her new position, she said, “I will be involved with all aspects of curatorial work, including developing exhibitions and managing the collections. There’s a lot of paperwork, care and maintenance that goes on behind the scenes that is not so glamorous.”

Her work also will include building relationships with artists, donors, scholars, other museum partners and community members.

Prior to her arrival in Pittsburgh, she started work on an exhibition yet to be announced that will open at the Carnegie in the spring.

Born in Seoul, South Korea, and moving to Canada as a child, Park said, “I was brought up in Vancouver in a very healthy artist-run culture.”

At the University of British Columbia, she earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in visual art and a master of arts in critical curatorial studies.

Twice an immigrant

She became interested in curatorial work as an undergraduate in a program that she called “very theoretically concentrated.” That interest was bolstered by working in many underfunded artist spaces in Vancouver, doing everything from cleaning to mounting exhibitions to fundraising.

“Being an immigrant twice in life also has impacted my role as a curator,” she said. “Curatorial work is related to everything else that happens in a culture and society.”

Her research interests include mobility and migration as well as representations of violence in the colonial present.

“I’m really looking forward to working with Eric (Crosby, the Carnegie Museum’s Henry J. Heinz II director), to look at where we are with the collection, to add to the collection and to carry on the work of my predecessors.

“I’m excited to be able to lift up my colleagues’ work and to be involved in the upcoming Carnegie International (opening in September 2022),” she said. “One thing I do want to iterate is how exciting it is to have my colleagues, people who have watched me work, to welcome me back.”

At the University at Buffalo Art Galleries, Park recently opened “Heather Hart: Afrotecture (Re)Collection,” featuring a newly commissioned architectural installation that quotes the historic Lorraine Motel balcony, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and “F: Reconstituting Tolstoy College,” on an anarchist college that operated as part of SUNY at Buffalo, 1969-1985.

Park also has curated exhibitions at Miller Institute for Contemporary Art at Carnegie Mellon University, Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Western Front in Vancouver, The Kitchen in New York and Seoul Art Space Geumcheon in South Korea.

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