Rory Padeken ’06 decided curation would be his future in his final year at Berkeley, when he was introduced to the found photography work of Tacita Dean. “[The professor] passed around her own copy of [Dean’s] book and let us touch and flip through its pages.” Padeken says he was “hooked,” and the work later became the subject of his master’s thesis. Padeken worked his way from processing admissions and memberships at museum front desks to becoming a curator at the San José Museum of Art. There, he curated exhibitions like California Dreamin’, a futuristic and fantastical reimagining of Southern California; video and photo installations from Dinh Q. Lê on war, displacement, and the Vietnamese experience; and Border Cantos, which examines the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. Padeken is currently the Vicki and Kent Logan Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Denver Art Museum.
Grace Kook-Anderson ’01 gravitated to seminars at Cal. For a shy student, they helped her find her voice and explore her identity as an Asian American woman, she says. In particular, a seminar led by Amy Lyford, Ph.D. ’97, on modern and contemporary art influenced her deeply. Since 2017, Kook-Anderson has been the Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Curator of Northwest Art at the Portland Art Museum and specializes in regional art from California and the Northwest. Among her curatorial work is the 2019 exhibition The Map Is Not the Territory, which she described as “a collective practice that meditated on our connections to the land, bringing Indigenous values to the forefront and celebrating the region’s kinship.”
As someone who grew up creating art, Heidi Rabben ’04 thought she would be a studio art major at Berkeley. But after taking an art history course, she says she “discovered there was a discipline linking my long-standing interests in writing, visual analysis, storytelling, and history with art practice.” Her catholic interests led her to coursework in astronomy, Buddhism, philosophy, and English. She was also active all four years in Danceworx, Cal’s oldest student-run dance organization. Rabben, who is currently the senior curator at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, says she was drawn to curation because it’s “inherently multidisciplinary.” In addition to curating, Rabben is a writer, editor, and researcher with a focus on international contemporary video and installation art. She recently curated an exhibition of fellow Cal alumnus Nicki Green’s, MFA ’18, called Firmament, which explores “identity, transformation, and reinvention of Jewish traditions.”
When he transferred to Cal from community college, Tyler Cann ’95 envisioned himself becoming an art history professor. But his time as a student docent at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) changed that. One exhibition in particular inspired him to pursue curation. In a Different Light was about contemporary art from a queer perspective. The exhibition’s co-curator, Lawrence Rinder, who would later serve as BAMPFA’s director, introduced Cann to the process of curatorial work. “I look back, that moment was really illuminating.” He thought about that show a lot, he says, while assisting in the curation of Art after Stonewall, 1969–1989, in 2020, at the Columbus Museum of Art. The award-winning exhibition brought together more than 165 artists to mark the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. Cann, who also has a master’s degree in art history from Harvard, is now senior curator of modern and contemporary art at the Honolulu Museum of Art.
Clara Kim ’97 says she “accidentally” fell into art history while taking a humanities requirement at Berkeley. “[It gave] me the permission to pursue a field that was never that accessible to me growing up in a first-generation Korean American family,” says Kim, who was born in Seoul. Currently the chief curator and director of curatorial affairs at MOCA in Los Angeles, she focuses on a “revisionist, decolonial perspective of art” in relation to transnational migration and diaspora. Her curation has appeared in museums worldwide, including Walker Art Center, Redcat, and the Tate Modern. At the Tate, she curated a retrospective on the work of Twelve Years a Slave director Steve McQueen. She would later interview the director as part of the Berkeley Arts and Design Thursdays lecture series. Kim is currently working on a retrospective of Hawaiian artist Paul Pfeiffer and is in the research phase of an exhibition about artists who were affected by World War II internment in the United States.
