2:04 p.m., Aug. 3, 2007--The Department of Art's “Curating Contemporary Culture” lecture series for the fall semester has been set for three Tuesday evenings beginning in October. All three lectures will run from 5-7 p.m. in 130 Smith Hall.

The first lecture, on Oct. 2, will feature Laura Heon, director and curator of Site Santa Fe, a contemporary art museum in Santa Fe, N.M. Heon has extensive curatorial, teaching and publishing experience and, before her tenure with Site Santa Fe, was curator at MASS MoCA, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams.

At SITE Santa Fe, Heon has organized one-person shows for Stephen Bush, Barry X. Ball, Darren Almond and Hans Schabus in 2007 and for Dana Schutz in 2005. Shows Heon organized at MASS MoCA included Matthew Ritchie: Proposition Player (2004) with Houston CAM; Ann Hamilton: corpus (2003); Yankee Remix: Artists Take on New England (2003); Uncommon Denominator: New Art from Vienna (2002) and Game Show (2001).

The second lecture, on Oct. 30, will feature Ivo Mesquita, an internationally respected art curator, critic, writer and lecturer who has held many guest curator positions in the United States, Canada and Brazil.

Mesquita, who since 1996 has been a visiting professor at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in Rhinebeck, N.Y., also is chief curator at Pinacoteca do Estado, in São Paulo, Brazil. He has held positions as artistic director of the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo and the Museu de Arte Moderna in São Paulo. He is the author of the books, Leonilson: use é lindo, eu garanto (1997, first printing; 2006, second printing); Daniel Senise: ela que não está (1998); and Eliane Prolik: Noutro Lugar (2005), as well as many catalog essays.

The third lecture, on Dec. 4, will feature Hou Hanru, San Francisco Art Institute's director of exhibitions and public programs and an internationally known contemporary art critic, curator and writer. He has curated more than 50 exhibitions and has published articles in numerous art magazines and catalogues.

Hanru was born in 1963 in China and lived for several years in Paris before immigrating to the United States. Besides his executive roles at the San Francisco Art Institute, he is a professor at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam and a visiting professor at HISK, Hoger Instituut voor Shone Kunsten, in Antwerp, Belgium. He also has held positions as the French correspondent of Flash Art International and as a member of the Global Advisory Committee of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

All three lectures are free and open to the public. For more information, call (302) 831-2706.