GHENT, NY.- Art Omi announces the appointment of Sara O’Keeffe as Senior Curator of the Sculpture & Architecture Park following an extensive search. O’Keeffe will oversee the contemporary art exhibitions and programming in the Sculpture & Architecture Park, working in partnership with Art Omi: Architecture Curator & Program Director, Julia van den Hout, who curates architecture exhibitions and programming.
“We are thrilled to welcome Sara O’Keeffe as Senior Curator at Art Omi,” said Ruth Adams, Co-Executive Director of Art Omi. “Sara has a robust resumé of curatorial experience contemplating identity and its representations in contemporary art, and developing projects that hold dialogue and community at their center. As we celebrate our thirtieth year, she’s the perfect leader to take our mission of building community with creative expression as its common denominator into the future.”
Sara O’Keeffe joins Art Omi after serving as Nancy E. Meinig Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma from 2019-2022. There, she organized From the Limitations of Now (2021), an exhibition developed with community partners inspired by a speech that Oklahoma-born author Ralph Ellison delivered in his home state about art’s role in addressing histories that have been suppressed in Oklahoma and across the country. During her time at Philbrook, O’Keeffe added significant works by Marisol, Lonnie Holley, and Troy Montes-Michie to the Museum’s permanent collection.
From 2013-2019, O’Keeffe was at the New Museum in New York as Assistant and Associate Curator, where she co-curated Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon (2017) with Johanna Burton and Natalie Bell, a group exhibition that investigated gender’s place in contemporary art and culture, and was on the curatorial team for the Triennial: Surround Audience (2015) with Lauren Cornell and Ryan Trecartin. While at the New Museum, she curated projects with Morgan Bassichis, Dynasty Handbag, Carolyn Lazard, Tau Lewis, and Sable Elyse Smith, among others.
In 2016, O’Keeffe organized the Museum’s first youth summit, Scamming the Patriarchy, developed by an emerging generation of artists, writers, and activists, including BUFU, Brujas, Discwoman, and members of House of Ladosha. The summit was organized around five guiding principles: healing, self-love, skill building, political education, and empowerment. She has contributed to ArtReview, CURA, Mousse, Osmos Magazine, Topical Cream, and catalogues including the Triennial: Surround Audience, Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon, and La Biennale di Venezia 2019: May You Live in Interesting Times. Before joining the New Museum, O’Keeffe worked in the Curatorial Department at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York from 2011-2013.
“I’m honored to join Art Omi as Senior Curator, an institution with a thirty-year history of supporting artists and serving as a lab for experimentation and critical dialogues,” said O’Keeffe. “I am excited to build upon Art Omi’s rich legacy and propel its work forward, thinking about how to create platforms that are generative for an interdisciplinary group of thinkers and makers, and imagine art institutions as sites of civic exchange. It is wonderful to join the vibrant community in the Hudson Valley, and to think alongside so many colleagues and artists who I deeply admire.”
Founded in 1992, Art Omi has emerged as one of the preeminent cultural attractions in the upper Hudson Valley, welcoming over 45,000 visitors per year to engage with exhibitions across its 120 acres of field and forest.
