Jane Shelton Livingston (born 12 February 1944) is an American art

curator A curator (from , meaning 'to take care') is a manager or overseer. When working with cultural organizations, a curator is typically a "collections curator" or an "exhibitions curator", and has multifaceted tasks dependent on the particular ins ...

. She is the author and co-author of numerous books and catalogs.

Life and work

Livingston was born in Upland, California. From 1967 to 1975, she was curator of

20th-century art Twentieth-century art—and what it became as modern art—began with modernism in the late nineteenth century. Overview Nineteenth-century movements of Post-Impressionism (), Art Nouveau and Symbolism led to the first twentieth-century art mov ...

at the

Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits (George C. Page Museum). LACMA was founded in 1961 ...

. She was editor of the

Richard Diebenkorn Richard Diebenkorn (April 22, 1922 – March 30, 1993) was an American painter and printmaker. His early work is associated with abstract expressionism and the Bay Area Figurative Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In the late 1960s he began ...

''Catalogue Raisonné'' and as of 2011 was working as an independent curator. In 1975 she became associate director and chief curator at the

Corcoran Gallery of Art The Corcoran Gallery of Art is a former art museum in Washington, D.C., that is now the location of the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, a part of the George Washington University. Founded in 1869 by philanthropist William Wilson Corco ...

, but resigned in 1989, prompted by the Corcoran's cancellation of a show of work by photographer

Robert Mapplethorpe Robert Michael Mapplethorpe ( ; November 4, 1946 – March 9, 1989) was an American photographer, best known for his black-and-white photographs. His work featured an array of subjects, including celebrity portraits, male and female Nude (art), n ...

. Livingston had been on

sabbatical A sabbatical (from the Hebrew: (i.e., Sabbath); in Latin ; Greek: ) is a rest or break from work; "an extended period of time intentionally spent on something that’s not your routine job." The concept of the sabbatical is based on the Bi ...

, writing a book under a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are Grant (money), grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, endowed by the late Simon Guggenheim, Simon and Olga Hirsh Guggenheim. These awards are bestowed upon indiv ...

when the exhibition was cancelled; when she returned, she made it clear that she would not have cancelled the show. Livingston had arranged the installation, which was financed in part by the

National Endowment for the Arts The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created in 1965 as an independent agency of the feder ...

(NEA). She organized a major museum exhibition of

Chicano art The Chicano Art Movement represents groundbreaking movements by Mexican-American artists to establish a unique artistic identity in the United States. Much of the art and the artists creating Chicano Art were heavily influenced by Chicano Movement ...

, and, together with

Marcia Tucker Marcia Tucker (née Silverman; April 11, 1940 – October 17, 2006)Smith, RobertaTucker obituary "Marcia Tucker - Obituary" ''The New York Times'' (October 19, 2006), Retrieved 23 November 2014. was an American art historian, art critic and curato ...

, the first major museum exhibition of

Bruce Nauman Bruce Nauman (born December 6, 1941) is an American artist. His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance. Nauman lives near Galisteo, New Mexico. Life and work ...

. Other exhibitions include her show of

National Geographic ''National Geographic'' (formerly ''The National Geographic Magazine'', sometimes branded as ''Nat Geo'') is an American monthly magazine published by National Geographic Partners. The magazine was founded in 1888 as a scholarly journal, nine ...

, "illustrative" photography. She and curator John Beardsley also curated an exhibition of black

outsider art Outsider art is Fine art, art made by Autodidacticism, self-taught individuals who are untrained and untutored in the traditional arts with typically little or no contact with the Convention (norm), conventions of the art worlds. The term ''ou ...

ists in 1982. This show "marked an explosion of interest in the work of

African American African Americans, also known as Black Americans and formerly also called Afro-Americans, are an Race and ethnicity in the United States, American racial and ethnic group that consists of Americans who have total or partial ancestry from an ...

artists." Livingston's ''The New York School of Photography'' (1992) has been described as a "path-breaking study", first identifying the titular subject. Livingston curated a show of John Alexander's works at the

Smithsonian American Art Museum The Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM; formerly the National Museum of American Art) is a museum in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian Institution. Together with its branch museum, the Renwick Gallery, SAAM holds one of the world's lar ...

in 2008. Livingston's work on ''The Art of Richard Diebenkorn'' (1997) helped produce a book that collected the most important works of

, who had been under-represented in publishing. The ''catalogue'' raisonné she compiled on the artist appeared in 2016.

Publications

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Livingston, Jane 1944 births Living people People from Upland, California American art curators American women curators Photography curators 21st-century American women