Jens Hoffmann, who is stepping down as deputy director of New York’s Jewish Museum as Artnews reported last week, has clarified what his new role as director of special exhibitions and public programmes means for him and for the museum. “I am not leaving the Jewish Museum,” Hoffmann said in an email to The Art Newspaper. “I am relinquishing some of my administrative responsibilities so that I can have a more flexible schedule and focus more on exhibition making and writing.” Among the first of these projects is Front International, a multi-venue, citywide contemporary art festival to take place in Cleveland every three years, with the first edition due to run from 7 July to 30 September 2018. Hoffmann was named co-artistic director of the triennial with the Chicago-based artist and curator Michelle Grabner.
“This arrangement allows me to continue working on selected exhibitions and programs at the Jewish Museum over the next couple of years while giving me freedom to pursue projects with other institutions such as Front International,” Hoffmann added. His appointment with the Cleveland event fits in with his previous experience curating international biennials, including Shanghai’s (2012), Istanbul’s (2011) and Lyon’s (2007). Hoffmann is also keeping his position as senior-curator-at-large at MOCA Detroit, which he has held since before joining the Jewish Museum and “which is something very close to my heart,” he says. “I have also been working with the Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco and Paris since 2008, which will continue.”
At the Jewish Museum, Hoffmann’s current and forthcoming exhibitions include Roberto Burle Marx: Brazilian Modernist (until 18 September), organised with curator Claudia Nahson, and the participatory show Take Me (I’m Yours) (16 September-5 February 2017), organised with curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Kelly Taxter. He is also working on the New York Jewish Film Festival in January 2017, along with other programming at the museum, like Wish You Were Here, a series of talks with historians, scientists, curators and artists portraying characters from Andy Warhol’s Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century (1980), and AM at the JM, a "breakfast salon" with artists that takes place every month at 8am.
Other endeavours include a book, Futurisms: The Art of the Future, that will be published by Thames and Hudson in late 2017, the 3rd People’s Biennial at Indianapolis MOCA in the summer of 2017, a show “about the relationship between art and animals called Animality at Marian Goodman Gallery in London this fall” and “a huge exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Moscow called Of Marginal Figures and Mayor Characters: American Art 1951-93 mixing well known artists with lesser known ones from that era,” Hoffmann says. He also writes regularly for Frieze, Artforum, Texte zur Kunst and is editor-at-large for Mousse Magazine.
“There is lots on my plate and I had to make room for the things that really excite me the most,” Hoffmann added.
