Jane Farver

Jane Farver was formerly director of the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Director of Exhi¬bitions at the Queens Museum of Art in New York; director of the Lehman College Art Gallery, City University of New York, in the Bronx, NY; assistant director of the Alternative Museum in New York, NY; and director of Spaces in Cleveland, Ohio. She was one of six co-curators for the 2000 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, NY; and was co-commissioner for the American representative (Paul Pfeiffer) for the 9th Cairo Biennial, an exhibition that traveled to Athens for the 2004 Olympics. She he has served as a juror or panelist for many organizations, including the National Endowment for the Arts, The American Academy in Rome, and the Busan Biennale. She was also the Artistic Director of the 2011 Incheon Women Artists Biennale in Incheon, South Korea, and a consulting director for Prospect New Orleans, P3. She has received awards from the Asian Cultural Council, the Ohio Governor’s office, and others. For her work at MIT, Farver was awarded the 2011 the György Kepes Fellowship Prize. She is currently a visiting critic at the Cornell University AAP NYC program, is editor of the catalogue for Joan Jonas’s exhibition at the U.S. Pavilion for the Venice Biennale in 2015, and is consulting for the University of Massachusetts Lowell on the establishment of new art programs for the campus.
At MIT, Jane Farver was responsible for permanent commissions of works of art by Martin Boyce, Cai Guo Qiang, Matthew Ritchie, Dan Graham, Sol LeWitt, Sarah Sze, and others; she also initiated artist residencies by Tavares Strachan, Adel Abdessemed, Chantal Ackerman, Sue Mei Tse, Chrisian Jankowski, Marjetica Potrc, Francois Roche, Natascha Sadr-Haghighian, Cerith Wyn Evans, and others. Exhibitions she has organized include Tavares Strachan: Orthostatic Tolerance: It Might Not Be Such a Bad Idea if I Never Went Home; Adel Abdessemed: Situation and Practice; Michael Joo; Artur Zmijewski: Selected Works from 1998-2003; Yael Bartana: Three Works; Paul Pfeiffer; Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin 1950s-1980s (with Luis Camnitzer, Rachel Weiss and others); Out of India: Contemporary Art of the South Asian Diaspora; Cai Guo-Qiang, Cultural Melting Bath: Projects for the 20th Century; Across the Pacific: Contemporary Korean and Korean American Art; Sensorium, Embodied Experience, Contemporary Art, and Technology (with Yuko Hasegawa, Caroline Jones and others) and Adrian Piper: Reflections: 1967-1987. Farver holds an MA in Art History from Kent State University in Ohio, and a BA in English from Seton Hill College on Pennsylvania.

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