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Best Art Curators In Los Angeles


Most everyone has walked the halls of a museum at least once in their lifetime. Some of the artists whose work hangs on the walls have famous names – Renoir, Picasso, Van Gogh – and others are of new, young, living artists trying deliver their particular messages and dreaming of working them into history. Who decides which work deserves to be showcased at a particular gallery or museum falls heavily on the shoulders of art curators. These are five of the city's best: the people who truly know art in Los Angeles.
Carole Ann Klonarides
Linkedin

Klonarides is an independent curator of contemporary art and media. She also works as a UCLA university professor of media arts and as an art writer. She was recently involved in the Pacific Standard Time Performance and Public Art Festival, during which, along with Dawn Kasper, she organized several Los Angeles artists to create music, video, art and essays at the Human Resources Gallery. Klonarides received a bachelor's of fine arts from Virginia Commonwealth University, participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 1973, and earned a master's from the New School for Social Research in 1983. Between her many achievements, Klonarides has been the director of the Baskerville Watson Gallery in New York, a curator at the Santa Monica Museum, a consultant at the Getty Research Institute, and the Media Arts Curator at the Long Beach Museum of Art.

Related: Top Five Photographers in Los Angeles

Rafkho Studios Renee Fox
(Photo Credit: Rafkho Studios)

Renee A. Fox
Linkedin

Fox works as the director and curator of the Beacon Arts enterprise, which is housed at the iconic Beacon Arts Building in the Inglewood Arts District. She is also the co-owner of Rafkho Studios and an independent fine art professional who has exhibited her work in various art galleries. She attended the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C., and earned her BFA from Otis College of Art and Design. In 2005, Fox was awarded a month-long artist residency at the Julia and David White Artist Colony in Costa Rica, where the beauty of nature and the country's rain forest inspired her and influenced her art sensibility significantly.

Alanna Simone
(Photo Credit: Alanna Simone)

Alanna Simone
www.alannasimone.com

Simone is the curator of a monthly series (MIA at the Armory Center for the Arts) that screens the work of artists using the moving image. Peruse her work at www.miascreen.com. Simone has a bachelor's degree in film and video production from the Brooks Institute of Photography, Santa Barbara, and is a transplant to Los Angeles from San Francisco since August of 2011. She has her own body of work, which consists mostly of photographs of herself as cathartic responses to intense emotional situations.

18th Street Arts Center Bill Kelley Jr
(Photo Credit: 18th Street Arts Center)

Bill Kelley Jr.
Linkedin

Kelley is honored by being the first curator in residency at 18th Street Arts Center, a respected destination in West Los Angeles for national and international artists wishing to showcase their work. At 18th Street Arts Center, Kelley's residency will focus on social practice, an umbrella term for art forms that have community involvement and social activism at their core. Kelley has an master's in art history from the University of New Mexico and is a Ph.D. candidate in contemporary art, theory and criticism at the University of California San Diego.

tibby rothman
(Photo Credit: Twitter)

Tibby Rothman
Venice Paper

Rothman is an art curator, writer and journalist who was recently involved with the much-praised Artists X Architects show at Joe's Restaurant in Venice, Calif. Rothman is credited with creating the no longer published Venice Paper, in which she worked to crisscross the art and architecture scenes of Los Angeles. With the same intention, she has conducted and published an impressive portfolio of interviews with renowned Los Angeles architects and artists.

Related: Best Art Galleries in Santa Monica

Dena Burroughs is a freelance writer living in Azusa, CA. She is a CSULA graduate with specialties in Creative Writing and Communications. Her work can be found at Examiner.com.

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