Miwon Kwon (born November 18, 1961) is a Korean

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 ...

and art history educator. Her work focuses on contemporary art, land art and site-specific art. She has curated several exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and most recently she co-curated the exhibition ''Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974'' at the

Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) is a contemporary art museum with two locations in greater Los Angeles, California. The main branch is located on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, near the Walt Disney Concert Hall. MOCA's o ...

with Philipp Kaiser. She began her position in the Art History Department at

UCLA The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...

in 1998, where she currently maintains her tenure as the department chair.

Early life and education

Kwon was born in

South Korea South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), is a country in East Asia, constituting the southern part of the Korea, Korean Peninsula and sharing a Korean Demilitarized Zone, land border with North Korea. Its western border is formed ...

in 1961, and at age ten migrated to the United States, where her father was employed as a foreign correspondent for a Korean newspaper. She graduated from

UC Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of Californi ...

with a B.A. in Architecture and a M.A. in Photography, and then went on to

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

to complete a Ph.D. in Architectural History and Theory in 1998.

Published works

She was a founding editor and publisher of the art criticism publication ''

Documents A document is a writing, written, drawing, drawn, presented, or memorialized representation of thought, often the manifestation of nonfiction, non-fictional, as well as fictional, content. The word originates from the Latin ''Documentum'', w ...

'' and has contributed essays to a number of arts publications, exhibition catalogs and art monographs. She is the author of ''One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity'', published by

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in 2002. Her work has received critical review Stephen Morton, who praised the book for being "an exciting survey of the genealogies and practices that variously constitute site-specificity" but criticizing it for not addressing "its own site-specificity in the US metropolitan art world". Kwon also contributed an essay entitled "Sitings of Public Art: Integration versus Intervention" to the 2002 anthology ''Alternative Art New York, 1965-1985''. She is currently working on her next book, a comprehensive study on the Cuban conceptual artist

Felix Gonzalez-Torres Felix may refer to: * Felix (name), people and fictional characters with the name Places * Arabia Felix is the ancient Latin name of Yemen * Felix, Spain, a municipality of the province Almería, in the autonomous community of Andalusia, S ...

. In 2012, Kwon organized the exhibition ''Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974'' at MOCA with Philipp Kaiser, and edited an extensive catalogue of the same name, published by Prestel.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kwon, Miwon 1961 births Living people American art curators American women curators South Korean curators South Korean women curators American art historians American people of Korean descent University of California, Berkeley alumni Princeton University alumni University of California, Los Angeles faculty Women art historians UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design alumni American women historians South Korean women historians Historians from California 21st-century American women