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Who

An influential art expert, tastemaker, and former curator at the MoMA, Storr is dean of the Yale School of Art. He directed the 2007 Venice Biennale.

Backstory

Storr grew up on the South Side of Chicago in a family of academics. As a teen in the late '60s, he spent a year in France (the revolutionary fervor in Paris at the time was formative, he says) and went on to receive his BA from Swarthmore in 1972 and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1978. After spending time Mexico as a studio assistant to muralist and firebrand David Alfaro Siqueiros, Storr returned to the US in the 1980s and made a name for himself as an art critic, championing artists like Louise Bourgeois and Bruce Nauman. In 1990 he started working at the MoMA, where he curated shows by the likes of Max Beckmann, Elizabeth Murray, Gerhard Richter, Robert Ryman, and Tony Smith, and rose to the post of senior curator of painting and sculpture by 1999. In 2002, he left the museum for academia, accepting the position of Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at NYU's Institute of the Fine Arts, a professorship endowed by Sheldon Solow. In 2007, he directed the Venice Biennale; soon after he was asked to head up the prestigious Yale School of Art.

In print

The author of dozens of catalogs and books, including monographs of Louise Bourgeois, Chuck Close, Alex Katz, and Phillip Guston, Storr is also a contributing editor at Art in America, writes frequently for Artforum, and has a bimonthly column in Frieze.

For the record

Storr was the first American to be trusted with overseeing the Venice Biennale, one of the most influential posts in the art world. That Storr has long promoted international art was a key factor, and at Venice he gave over a large amount of exhibition space to emerging artists from India, Africa, and Turkey.

On the side

Storr's own paintings have been exhibited at such established New York galleries as Betty Cunningham and Jack Tilton, and are in the collections of MoMA and the Nelson-Atkins Museum.

Personal

Storr is married to string musician Rosamund ("Ros") Morley, a member of several ensemble groups and a viol instructor at Columbia. They live in Carroll Gardens.