Olga Viso
Olga Viso is a Cuban American curator of modern and contemporary art and a museum director. She served as executive director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota from 2007 through 2017.Career
In 2008 joined the Walker Art Center, leaving her post as Director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden which she held since 2005. She joined the Hirshhorn in 1995, working her way up from assistant curator. Before that, Viso curated at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida and at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia. She is on the Board of Directors of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and belongs to the Association of Art Museum Directors.
Viso has curated many major exhibitions, including Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, Sculpture and Performance 1972-1985, a retrospective of about 100 works shown at the Hirshhorn and the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2004. Another exhibition Viso curated was Jim Hodges: Give More Than You Take. This show traveled from the Dallas Museum of Art to the Walker Art Center then on to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and ended at UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.
Viso resigned from her position as executive director of the Walker Art Center in 2017, and there was some speculation that her departure was related to the controversy surrounding Sam Durant's artwork Scaffold, though many museum professionals have publicly expressed support for Viso's handling of the work's reception.
