Best Curator

Few people know that the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art's spirited Dana Self brought honor on the city this past year when the National Endowment for the Arts named her to a panel that decides which museums and institutions get NEA funding. She also snagged a prestigious invitation to Bard College's Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture; only fifty curators -- and no one else from this region -- were asked by their peers to attend the conference at Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Self's essays on Alex Katz and Ken Aptekar appear in books recently distributed by the University of Washington Press. (Aptekar's work is on view through December 2 at the museum.) Self has a gift for spotting emerging artists. "I have a specific fondess and admiration for emerging artists and their work," she says, "and I've been lucky enough to work with many artists who have gone on, after we have organized exhibitions here, to have huge exhibitions at other museums, and that's really satisfying." A particularly gratifying moment was in the summer of 2000, Self says, "when we had Deborah Willis, an African-American artist out of Washington, D.C., and she got a MacArthur Fellowship Grant for half a million dollars -- right in the middle of our exhibition!"