The School of Art is pleased to announce a group of influential curators, artists and educators as Distinguished Critics for the 2023 MFA thesis exhibition. Dean Daderko, Rebecca Matalon, Amanda Ross-Ho, and Tyler Shine will join the full faculty in an all-day critique of thump, whoosh, rumble on April 14.
About the Distinguished Critics:
Dean Daderko is a curator. Their most recent project—Ecstatic Land at Ballroom Marfa in Marfa, Texas, which they co-curated with Daisy Nam—brings together a multi-generational group of artists whose work explore the intersecting vitalities of land and selfhood. While based at CAMH in Houston, TX, Daderko presented solo projects with Joan Jonas, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Nicolas Moufarrege, Paul Ramírez Jonas, and Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz, regularly accompanied by new commissions. Their writing has appeared in publications for the Americas’ Society, El Museo del Barrio, Les presses du réel, Mousse, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. They are the recipient of two curatorial research fellowships from the Étant donées Contemporary Art program, most recently to support scholarship on Bouchra Khalili, Claude Cahun, and Marcel Moore.
Rebecca Matalon is Senior Curator at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH), where she has organized exhibitions of work by Garrett Bradley, Mariah Garnett, Diane Severin Nguyen, and Cauleen Smith, as well as the two-person exhibition Wild Life: Elizabeth Murray & Jessi Reaves (2021). Prior to joining CAMH in 2019, Matalon was Assistant Curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), where she organized numerous solo projects and thematic collection exhibitions. Matalon was a Co-Founder, and from 2015–2018, Curator at JOAN, a not-for-profit exhibition space in Los Angeles that is dedicated to presenting the work of emerging and under-represented artists. She serves on the board of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) and was on the Organizing Committee of Texas Talks Art, a multi-institutional initiative that launched in January 2021.
Amanda Ross-Ho is an interdisciplinary artist and Professor of Sculpture at the University of California, Irvine. She has exhibited, lectured, and taught internationally. Exhibitions include the 2008 Whitney Biennial, The Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, The Walker Art Center, the Bonner Kunstverein and the Vleshaal Contemporary Art Center. Recently she was included in Crack Up Crack Down, the 33rd Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts curated by Slavs and Tatars, and a solo exhibition at Kunsthall Stavanger, Norway. She has presented commissioned public works at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, City Hall Park, New York City, the Parcours Sector of Art Basel Switzerland, and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
Tyler Shine is an art historian, curator, and educator. Currently, Shine is a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in twentieth-century art with research interests in the histories of modernism, the African diaspora, the intersections of visual art and popular culture, time-based media, and modern architecture and design. He is a fellow at Alma|Lewis, an experimental contemporary art platform based in Pittsburgh dedicated to Black culture. Shine was the Constance E. Clayton fellow in the Prints, Drawings and Photographs Department at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from 2016 to 2018 and recently was assistant curator of art at The Andy Warhol Museum. Previously, he worked at The Phillips Collection and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.
Images (l to r): Dean Daderko, Rebecca Matalon (Photo by Bria Lauren), Amanda Ross-Ho (Photo by Max Li), and Tyler Shine (photo by Tara Geyer)