New York’s Guggenheim Museum hires curator of art and technology

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The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, a temple to 20th-century Modernism whose Frank Lloyd Wright-designed building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side will mark its 65th anniversary next year, is staking its claim to the cutting edge of contemporary art with the hiring of Noam Segal as an associate curator on art and technology.

Segal begins her tenure today (27 March) as the museum’s LG Electronics Associate Curator, a position that falls under the umbrella of the LG Guggenheim Art and Technology Initiative, a five-year partnership between the museum and the Korean electronics giant. She will work across departments informing the many ways the museum engages with new developments in technology, from digital art and robotics to artificial intelligence and quantum computing.

“I look forward to begin working with my colleagues to develop new exciting programmes and continue to shape the future of digital art at the museum,” Segal said in a statement, describing the Guggenheim as “an institution that advances art and technology through research and investigation, rigour and responsibility, and a clear commitment to artists and sustainable futures".

Segal currently works at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where she is a professor and the director of research in the Masters programme for curatorial practice. Last year she served on the curatorial team for the Berlin Biennale and organised a performance by Maria Hassabi as part of the Front International triennial in Cleveland. Her previous projects including curating or co-curating a Neïl Beloufa exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, a Pope.L exhibition at La Panacée in Montpellier, France, and an Anri Sala exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.

Segal “has demonstrated a clear and sensitive curatorial vision for the future of this field”, the Guggenheim's chief curator and deputy director Naomi Beckwith said in a statement. Kate Oh, LG’s vice president, concurred: "Segal’s extensive expertise enables her to be aware of the very pulse of cultural and creative innovations, while her eyes scan the horizon of emerging technology."

In her new role, Segal will produce scholarship and other public-facing materials related to issues in art and technology. She will also curate an artistic presentation toward the end of the five-year initiative between the Guggenheim and LG, according to a museum spokesperson. That partnership, announced last June, includes the creation of a $100,000 LG Guggenheim Award recognising an artist’s achievements in technology-based art. The inaugural recipient of that prize will be announced later this spring at the museum’s foremost gala event, the Young Collector’s Council Party. (Last year, the Guggenheim discontinued its biannual, $100,000 Hugo Boss Prize, which was first awarded in 1996.)