Party

The New Museum of Contemporary Art in association with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School will hold a memorial tribute to the late Marcia Tucker, founding director of The New Museum.

A visionary curator without resources or a collection, Marcia Tucker founded the New Museum of Contemporary Art in 1977 at The New School, at the invitation of philanthropist and New School Trustee Vera List. Tucker’s model for a museum dedicated to exhibiting the work of emerging and under-recognized artists defied conventional practices of the art world at that time, and launched a potent and enduring international model for the exhibition of contemporary art in a museum context. In 1983, the New Museum moved to larger premises in SoHo, and will open its new building on the Bowery in the fall of 2007.

As director of the New Museum from 1977 to 1999, Marcia Tucker organized such polemical exhibitions as Bad Painting (1978) and Bad Girls (1994), and presided over the first museum exhibitions of John Baldessari, Christian Boltanski, Barry Le Va, Ana Mendieta, Carolee Schneeman, and David Wojnarowicz. She was also the series editor of Documentary Sources in Contemporary Art, influential books of theory and criticism published by the New Museum.

From 1969 to 1977, Tucker was Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she organized solo exhibitions of the work of Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Bruce Nauman, and Richard Tuttle, among others. It was her show of Tuttle’s provocative and minimal work that provoked her departure from the Whitney Museum.

Tucker was the 1999 recipient of the Bard College Award for Curatorial Achievement, and received the ArtTable Award for Distinguished Service to the Visual Arts in 2000. She was a dedicated lecturer, teacher and writer. Tucker also led a secret life as stand-up comic Mabel McNeil and her alter ego “Miss Mannerist.”

Introduction
Lisa Phillips, Henry Luce III Director, The New Museum of Contemporary Art

Participants 
Susan Torruella Leval, Director Emeritus, El Museo del Barrio
Martin Friedman, former director, The Walker Art Center
John Baldessari, artist
Carol Becker, Dean of Faculty and Senior Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, The School of the Art Institute Chicago
Ned Rifkin, Under Secretary for Art, Smithsonian Institution
Larissa Simpson, student, Brooklyn College
Pat Steir, artist

Music
Sacred Harp Singers