Jane Shelton Livingston (born 12 February 1944) is an American art

curator A curator (from la, cura, meaning "to take care") is a manager or overseer. When working with cultural organizations, a curator is typically a "collections curator" or an "exhibitions curator", and has multifaceted tasks dependent on the parti ...

. She is the author and co-author of numerous books and catalogs.

Life and work

Livingston was born in Upland, California. From 1967 to 1975, she was curator of

20th-century art Twentieth-century art—and what it became as modern art—began with modernism in the late nineteenth century. Overview Nineteenth-century movements of Post-Impressionism ( Les Nabis), Art Nouveau and Symbolism led to the first twentieth-century ...

at the

Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile, Los Angeles, California, Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits (George C. Pa ...

. She was editor of the

Richard Diebenkorn Richard Diebenkorn (April 22, 1922 – March 30, 1993) was an American painter and printmaker. His early work is associated with abstract expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In the late 1960s he bega ...

''Catalogue Raisonné'' and now works as an independent curator. In 1975 she became associate director and chief curator at the

Corcoran Gallery of Art The Corcoran Gallery of Art was an art museum in Washington, D.C., United States, that is now the location of the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, a part of the George Washington University. Overview The Corcoran School of the Arts & Design ...

, but resigned in 1989, prompted by the Corcoran's cancellation of a show of work by photographer

Robert Mapplethorpe Robert Michael Mapplethorpe (; November 4, 1946 – March 9, 1989) was an American photographer, best known for his black-and-white photographs. His work featured an array of subjects, including celebrity portraits, male and female nudes, self-p ...

. Livingston had been on

sabbatical A sabbatical (from the Hebrew: (i.e., Sabbath); in Latin ; Greek: ) is a rest or break from work. The concept of the sabbatical is based on the Biblical practice of ''shmita'' (sabbatical year), which is related to agriculture. According to ...

, writing a book under a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

when the exhibition was cancelled; when she returned, she made it clear that she would not have cancelled the show. Livingston had arranged the installation, which was financed in part by the

National Endowment for the Arts The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal ...

(NEA). She is known for organizing a major museum exhibition of

Chicano art The Chicano Art Movement represents groundbreaking movements by Mexican-American artists to establish a unique artistic identity in the United States. Much of the art and the artists creating Chicano Art were heavily influenced by Chicano Movement ( ...

, and, together with

Marcia Tucker Marcia Tucker (born Marcia Silverman; April 11, 1940 – October 17, 2006)Smith, Roberta ''The New York Times'' (October 19, 2006), Retrieved 23 November 2014. was an American art historian, art critic and curator. In 1977 she founded the New M ...

, the first major museum exhibition of

Bruce Nauman Bruce Nauman (born December 6, 1941) is an American artist. His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance. Nauman lives near Galisteo, New Mexico. Life and work ...

. Other exhibitions include her show of

National Geographic ''National Geographic'' (formerly the ''National Geographic Magazine'', sometimes branded as NAT GEO) is a popular American monthly magazine published by National Geographic Partners. Known for its photojournalism, it is one of the most widely ...

, "illustrative" photography. She and curator John Beardsley also curated an exhibition of black

outsider art Outsider art is art made by self-taught or supposedly naïve artists with typically little or no contact with the conventions of the art worlds. In many cases, their work is discovered only after their deaths. Often, outsider art illustrates e ...

ists in 1982. This show "marked an explosion of interest in the work of

African American African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans and Afro-Americans) are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of ens ...

artists." Livingston curated a show of John Alexander's works at the

Smithsonian American Art Museum The Smithsonian American Art Museum (commonly known as SAAM, and formerly the National Museum of American Art) is a museum in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian Institution. Together with its branch museum, the Renwick Gallery, SAAM holds o ...

in 2008. Livingston's work on ''The Art of Richard Diebenkorn'' (1997) helped produce a book that collected the most important works of

, who had been under-represented in publishing. The ''catalogue'' raisonné she compiled on the artist appeared in 2016.

Publications

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Livingston, Jane 1944 births Living people People from Upland, California American art curators American women curators 21st-century American women