For Immediate Release
Contact: Walter Zooi
213-503-2300

Writer and Curator Eungie Joo Named Director of CalArts Gallery at REDCAT

Valencia, May 8, 2003 -- Mark Murphy, executive director of the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT), today announced the appointment of noted New York-based writer and curator Eungie Joo as director of the CalArts Gallery at REDCAT, which opens this October as part of the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex in downtown Los Angeles.

As the 3,000-square-foot gallery's principal curator, Joo will work closely with Thomas Lawson, dean of CalArts' School of Art, to develop a curatorial approach that mirrors CalArts' core-values of artistic innovation and critical reflection. Artists from CalArts have consistently challenged established conventions and shaped the direction of emerging practices in contemporary art and design.

Joo will relocate to Los Angeles to assume the directorship of the CalArts Gallery, which is immediately adjacent to the REDCAT Performance Space. She plans to mount at least five exhibitions each year. These will feature the work of emerging artists drawn from the local, national and international arenas.

"I am very pleased that Eungie has joined the REDCAT team," said Murphy. "She is an important new voice that is redefining the visual arts as well as the presentation of visual arts. She has a substantial track record of questioning established forms and procedures. This makes her a wonderful match for the CalArts Gallery at REDCAT and the mission of REDCAT as a presenting entity."

Joo, commenting on her appointment, said: "I look forward to the unique challenges of advancing the interests of art and of curatorial practice in Los Angeles with the opening of the CalArts Gallery at REDCAT. The move to Los Angeles promises a host of enlightening people, experiences and spaces, and I look forward to participating in the rich cultural life of Los Angeles with its well-known history as a major contributor to world art."

The School of Art's Lawson added: "We are very excited because she brings a vision of a different kind of curatorial practice, one that puts the entire enterprise into question but has a lot of fun doing that. She has a tremendous amount of enthusiasm and energy, and the entire faculty think it's going to be a blast."

Eungie Joo received her doctorate in Ethnic Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. Her dissertation, Crisis to Collapse: The Racialized Subject in Contemporary American Art, examines the rise and fall of identity politics. In this work, she challenges the trivializing confines of the terms "identity," "political correctness" and "multiculturalism" in critical writing and curatorial practice. She also discusses several key works of the 1990s which engage humor, fantasy, violence, pseudo-science, and desire to distort the reliability of race knowledge.

She is co-curator, with Doryun Chong and René de Guzman, of the current exhibition Time After Time: Asia and Our Moment at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. The show features works that consider public discourse about progress, personal investments in memory and tradition, transitional spaces, and the coexistence of multiple systems of time.

Joo has contributed to Artweek, ArtPress (Paris), Flash Art, FYI (New York), and Wolgan Misool (Seoul) as well as exhibition publications dealing with the work of artists Mark Bradford, Margaret Kilgallen, Bul Lee, Barry McGee, Kara Walker and the group show Freestyle at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

She is also a contributing editor of Art AsiaPacific Magazine and a member of the Artistic Committee of Etant Donnés, the French American Fund for Contemporary Art. She has served on the Advisory Committee to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as well as on the boards of directors of Asian Women United of California, the Korean American Arts Festival, and the Oakland Asian Cultural Center.