Alexandra Munroe

Alexandra Munroe is an American curator, Asia scholar, and author focusing on art, culture, and institutional global strategy. She has produced over 40 exhibitions and published pioneering scholarship on modern and contemporary Asian art. She organized the first major North American retrospectives of artists Yayoi Kusama (1989), Daido Moriyama (1999), Yoko Ono (2000), Mu Xin (2001), Cai Guo-Qiang (2008), and Lee Ufan (2011), among others, and has brought such historic avant-garde movements as Gutai, Mono-ha, and Chinese conceptual art, as well as Japanese otaku culture, to international attention. Her project ''Japanese Art after 1945: Scream Against the Sky'' (1994) is recognized for initiating the field of postwar Japanese art history in North America. Recently, Munroe was lead curator of the Guggenheim’s exhibition, ''Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World'' (co-organized with Philip Tinari and Hou Hanru), which the New York Times named as one of 2017’s top ten exhibitions and ARTnews named as one of the decade’s top 25 most influential shows. Credited for the far-reaching impact of her exhibitions and scholarship bolstering knowledge of postwar Japanese art history in America and Japan, she received the 2017 Japan Foundation Award and the 2018 Commissioner for Cultural Affairs Award, both bestowed by the government of Japan.

An authority on modern and contemporary Asian art and transnational art studies, Munroe is Senior Curator and Director, Curatorial Affairs, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and Senior Curator, Asian Art and Senior Advisor, Global Arts, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, New York, positions created for her since she joined the museum in 2006. Under her leadership, the Guggenheim has expanded its mission to broadening the geographical scope of its programs through the study, acquisition, and exhibition of art from non-Western regions. As director of curatorial affairs for the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Project, she leads a team based in New York and Abu Dhabi charged with shaping its curatorial vision, building a collection of global art spanning the 1960s to the present, and developing and implementing the program that will establish Guggenheim Abu Dhabi as the preeminent modern and contemporary art museum in the region and beyond. She also founded and presides over the Guggenheim’s Asian Art Council, a curatorial think tank. Provided by Wikipedia