Betti-Sue Hertz

Almost Wallpaper

Almost Wallpaper
1989
screen print
edition: 27
image: 30"h X 22"w
Rives BFK

Attracted to the possibilities of overlapping organic forms unfixed and floating, I experimented. How might forms that could be sculptural unsettle on a flat surface? Through the proximities of the forms to each other, I wanted to conjure up the sensation of attraction. How might 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. As a curator and a scholar, she focuses on the intersection of critical visual culture, transnational exchange and socially relevant issues. Hertz's 2021 exhibition The Protest and The Recuperation surveyed 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. There she curated numerous large scale exhibitions focused on global exchange and political agency. Among others, these included:

  • 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

  • Nayland Blake: Free!Love!Tool!Box! which received an award from the International Art Critic Association

Hertz 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, was an in-depth consideration of cross-cultural regional developments. It received the prestigious Emily Hall Tremaine Award. 1992-1998, Hertz was Director at Longwood Arts Project in the South Bronx. She was curator in residence at HOW Art Museum, Shanghai in 2018.

As a student in the Ph.D. Program in Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. There, Hertz focused on contemporary art and architectural theory. Her MFA is from Hunter College, CUNY and her BA is from Goddard Colleg