"If you don't know what you want to do as a curator, just go looking."
Robert Storr has been a professor of painting and dean of the School of Art at Yale University since 2006. He was curator in the department of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from 1990 to 2002. He has taught at several universities and lectured widely in the U.S. and abroad. Storr has been a contributing editor at Art in America since 1981 and writes frequently for Artforum, Parkett, Art Press (Paris), and Frieze (London). Among his many honors are a Penny McCall Foundation Grant for painting, a Norton Family Foundation Curator Grant, and honorary doctorates from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Maine College of Art. He also has received awards from the American Chapter of the International Association of Art Critics, a special AICA award for Distinguished Contribution to the Field of Art Criticism, an ICI Agnes Gund Curatorial Award, and the Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American Art History from the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art. In 2000 the French Ministry of Culture presented Storr with the medal of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, and he was the commissioner of the 2007 Venice Biennale, the first American invited to assume that position.
In May 2010, Storr and critically acclaimed abstract painter Thomas Nozkowski participated in a live conversation at The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage during which they addressed the practice of painting, the making of painting exhibitions, and the relationship between the two. Storr is also a contributor to three Center publications: Curating Now (2001), What Makes a Great Exhibition? (2006), and Pigeons on the Grass, Alas: Contemporary Curators Talk About the Field (2013).
