UNM Art Museum Welcomes New Director

The Col­lege of Fine Arts wel­comes Lisa Tamiris Becker as the new direc­tor for the Uni­ver­sity of New Mex­ico Art Museum. Becker has been active as a cura­tor and arts admin­is­tra­tor for more than 18 years.

She has curated and orga­nized more than 50 major exhi­bi­tions with a pri­mary focus on hybrid inter­pre­ta­tions of mod­ern and con­tem­po­rary art, includ­ing many recent exhi­bi­tions at the CU Art Museum at the Uni­ver­sity of Col­orado Boul­der, where she has served as direc­tor since 2002. Becker led the devel­op­ment and grand-opening in 2010 of a new 25,000 square foot state-of-the-art museum facility.

Recent exhi­bi­tions that she has curated for the CU Art Museum include archiTECH­ton­ica; Peter Weg­ner: Wall-To-Wall-To-Wall; Lil­iana Porter: Fox in the Mir­ror; Luis Cruz Azaceta/Ambulatory: Museum Plan; In and Out of Time: Selec­tions from the CU Art Museum’s Video Col­lec­tion; Bar­bara Tak­e­naga: Micro/Macro; Gün­ther Gerzso and Octavio Paz: Pal­abras Grabadas/Graven Words; Techno/Sublime; Vestige/Vestigio: Laura Ander­son Bar­bata, Betsabeé Romero, and Oscar Muñoz; Paul DeMari­nis: Gray Mat­ter and Enrique Mar­tinez Celaya: Poetry in Process. She is also the co-curator of major land­mark CU Art Museum exhi­bi­tions such as David Maisel/Black Maps: Amer­i­can Land­scape and the Apoc­a­lyp­tic Sub­lime; Because the Earth is 1/3 Dirt; Waves on the Turquoise Lake: Con­tem­po­rary Expres­sion of Tibetan Art, and Through Soviet Jew­ish Eyes: Pho­tog­ra­phy, War, and the Holo­caust, which is cur­rently on view in New York City.

In 2005, Becker curated the Amer­i­can artists in Strata, an exhi­bi­tion at the for­mer Nobel Fac­tory in Stock­holm, Swe­den. Her exhi­bi­tions have been reviewed in “Art in Amer­ica”, “Time Mag­a­zine”, and “The Wall Street Jour­nal”, among other pub­li­ca­tions. Her other accom­plish­ments at the CU Art Museum include sig­nif­i­cant growth of its per­ma­nent col­lec­tion, con­ser­va­tion of many major works of art from across time-periods and cul­tures and devel­op­ment of an exhi­bi­tion and cat­a­logue pro­gram that has achieved regional, national and inter­na­tional recognition.

Selec­tions of Becker’s pre­vi­ous cura­to­r­ial projects include Mary Lucier: Bod­ies of Light; Julio Galan and Roberto Juarez: Marks of Tran­scen­dence; Visual Worlds: Visu­al­ity in the Age of Glob­al­iza­tion (co-curated); and Alice Street Revis­ited: The Palace at 9 a.m. and Related Works by Robert Arne­son. Becker has also lec­tured widely at art muse­ums, gal­leries and uni­ver­si­ties across the United States and abroad.

Becker earned her B.A. (Magna Cum Laude) from the Uni­ver­sity of Penn­syl­va­nia. She earned her M.F.A. in Stu­dio Art and Art The­ory from the Uni­ver­sity of Texas at Austin. She was born in Leeds, Eng­land in 1967.

Media Con­tact: Car­olyn Gon­za­les (505) 277‑5920; email: cgonzal@unm.edu