Alexandra Schwartz

Biography

Alexandra Schwartz is a New York-based curator and historian of modern and contemporary art. Her recent exhibitions include Ed Ruscha: OKLA at the Oklahoma Contemporary (2021) and As in Nature: Helen Frankenthaler Paintings at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, with a catalogue from Yale University Press (2017). Previously she was the founding curator of contemporary art at the Montclair Art Museum and a curator at the Museum of Modern Art. She is the author of Come as You Are: Art of the 1990s (University of California Press, 2015), Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles (MIT Press, 2010), the co-editor of Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, 2010), and the editor of Leave Any Information at the Signal: Writings, Interviews, Bits, Pages by Ed Ruscha (MIT Press, 2002). Her catalogues have twice won Awards for Excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators.

Schwartz has taught art history and curatorial practice at Columbia University, the University of Michigan, MoMA, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among other institutions. She received a PhD and MA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and an A.B. from Harvard University.