Distinguished scholar, writer and curator Helen Molesworth is chief curator of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. She was previously the Barbara Lee Chief Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Boston. There she organized one-person exhibitions of artists Catherine Opie (2011) and Josiah McElheny (2012), as well as group exhibitions such as Dance/Draw (2011). Her 2012 exhibition This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s reexamined the decade through the lenses of feminism, AIDS, corporate greed and queer culture. Molesworth has said that she tries to "situate as fully as one can the art of our time within the larger political and economic framework of our time." Before ICA, Molesworth was the Houghton Curator of Contemporary Art at Harvard Art Museum, where organized noteworthy exhibitions such as Long Life Cool White: Photographs by Moyra Davey and ACT UP New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987–1993. Prior to Harvard, Molesworth was chief curator of exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio; curator of contemporary art at the Baltimore Museum of Art; and director and curator of the Amelie A. Wallace Gallery at State University of New York, Old Westbury.
Molesworth and fellow curator Paul Schimmel visited The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage in February 2013 to discuss curating and historiography with visual arts and exhibition professionals from the Philadelphia area. She is a contributor to Pigeons on the Grass, Alas: Contemporary Curators Talk About the Field, published by the Center in 2013.
