Renowned curator and Latin-American scholar Olga Viso joins Herberger Institute team

Independent curator and nonprofit arts consultant Olga Viso has joined the ASU team as a senior adviser to Steven J. Tepper, dean of the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts.

Viso is part of a growing cadre of arts and culture professionals with diverse, entrepreneurial skills being recruited to the university by Tepper and ASU President Michael Crow as they advance the New American University, embedding designers, artists and arts-based inquiry both at the institution’s core and throughout the communities it serves locally, nationally and internationally.  

Viso will focus on developing global partnerships in the arts. Her key projects as senior adviser will include helping to shape the recently launched partnership with Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which is focused on professional development for emerging museum curators of color, and developing an interdisciplinary academic partnership with artist James Turrell and the Skystone Foundation centered around Roden Crater in Northern Arizona.

“Olga Viso is a first-rate curator and an internationally renowned scholar of contemporary art,” Tepper said. “I’m very pleased she’s agreed to help us build out the LACMA partnership and position the institute and our initiatives in the global art scene.”

Viso brings more than two decades of cultural leadership experience as former director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. A scholar of contemporary Latinx and Latin-American art, Viso is the child of Cuban émigré parents. She was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2013 as a member of the National Council on the Arts, and she advises the National Endowment for the Arts on cultural strategy. She has served on the boards of the Association of Art Museum Directors and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and is currently an adviser to the Rebuild Foundation in Chicago, which is focused on culturally-driven urban redevelopment.

“I am thrilled to join the team of global thought leaders Steven Tepper has brought to ASU,” Viso said. “My commitment to cross-disciplinary experimentation, to advancing diversity within the museum profession, and to elevating the voices of artists in society intersects with the values of this ambitious and entrepreneurial university.”