Elaine A. King

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Elaine A. King is a curator, critic, professor, and editor. She was born in Oak Park, Illinois. She earned a Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 1986, with study in Theory and Culture and History of Art. She also earned a joint master’s degree in Art History and Public Policy from Northern Illinois University, and a B.S. in Art History and American History (Pre-Law Studies) from NIU. In 2002 she received a Certificate of Fine Arts and Decorative Arts Appraisal from New York University. King retired from Carnegie Mellon University in 2017 and now works as a freelance curator and art critic.

King led the Carnegie Mellon Art Gallery as Executive Director and Curator from 1985 to 1991, and later served as Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati from 1993 to 1995. She has organized more than 45 exhibitions, including solo shows for artists such as Barry Le Va, Martin Puryear, Tishan Hsu, Gordan Matta-Clark, Elizabeth Murray, Mel Bochner, Nancy Spero, Robert Wilson, David Humphrey, and Martha Rosler. She also curated many group shows like Light Into Art: Photography to Virtual Reality, The Figure As Fiction, Abstraction Today, Drawing in the Eighties, and Art In the Age of Information.

King has worked as a guest curator for the Hungarian Graphic Arts Biennial (1993–2007) and for the Maria Mater O’Neill mid-career survey in San Juan in 2007. She curated Likeness: After Warhol’s Legacy at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh. She has lectured at international conferences and written about art for journals and newspapers. In 2007 she was critic-in-residence at Scuola Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence and spoke on censorship at the Ann Arbor Film Festival; in 2008 she represented the United States at the Association Internationale des Critiques d’Art in Barcelona.

King has received many grants and co-edited Ethics and the Visual Arts (Allworth Press, 2006) with Gail Levin. She is working on Taking Position: Issues on Critical Criteria with Saul Ostrow and a book titled In Your Face: Portraits 1960–2007. Her reviews and articles have appeared in Sculpture, Art on Paper, Art Papers, ARTES MAGAZINE, ArtUS, Grapheion, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and The Washington Post.