Betti-Sue Hertz
Almost Wallpaper
1989
screen print
edition: 27
image: 30"h X 22"w
Rives BFK
In making this work I was attracted to the possibilities of overlapping organic forms unfixed and floating. It was an experiment in how forms that could be sculptural would unsettle on a flat surface. I wanted to conjure up the sensation of attraction through the various proximities of the forms to each other and how an imaginary field could become a space--maybe macro, maybe micro--that was referential enough to elicit curiosity in the viewer.
Betti-Sue Hertz 2023
Betti-Sue Hertz is Director and Chief Curator at the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University since 2019. Her curatorial and scholarly work focuses on the intersection of critical visual culture, transnational exchange and socially relevant issues. Hertz's 2021 exhibition The Protest and The Recuperation was a survey of artistic perspectives on the global phenomenon of mass protest, as well as recuperative strategies of resistance.
Hertz was the Director of Visual Arts, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts from 2008-2015, where she curated numerous large scale exhibitions often focused on global exchange and political agency including Public Intimacy: Art and Other Ordinary Acts in South Africa (organized in collaboration with San Francisco Museum of Modern Art); Dissident Futures; Song Dong: Dad and Mom, Don’t Worry About Us; Renée Green: Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams and Nayland Blake: Free!Love!Tool!Box! which received an award from the International Art Critic Association; among others.
She was curator in residence at HOW Art Museum, Shanghai in 2018. Hertz has taught social art history and theory courses at Stanford University, San Francisco Art Institute and UC Berkeley. She was a member of Stanford Art Institute’s Creative Cities Working Group (2016-2019) and a founding member of RepoHistory (1989-2000).
The traveling exhibition, Past in Reverse: Contemporary Art of East Asia, an in-depth consideration of cross-cultural regional developments, received the prestigious Emily Hall Tremaine Award. Hertz was Director at Longwood Arts Project in the South Bronx from 1992-1998.
She was curator in residence at HOW Art Museum, Shanghai in 2018. Hertz has taught social art history and theory courses at Stanford University, San Francisco Art Institute and UC Berkeley. She was a member of Stanford Art Institute’s Creative Cities Working Group (2016-2019) and a founding member of RepoHistory (1989-2000).
Hertz studied in the Ph.D. Program in Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York with a focus on contemporary art and architectural theory, holds an MFA from Hunter College, CUNY and a BA from Goddard College.