Category: Curator
Nationality: British
Last Year: Reentry (81 in 2006)
When White Columns turned 40 this year, David Byrne and Cindy Sherman were among the birthday-party guests; an auction raised $300,000 for Manhattan’s oldest alternative art space. Matthew Higgs, director and chief curator, deserves credit: everyone respects him, and given the prodigious number of variously punk-spirited and cross-generational shows the English expat has put on since 2004, there’ve been opportunities aplenty to fail. Meanwhile, somehow, Higgs maintains a parallel career as an artist, exhibiting his droll, language-based conceptualism this year at New York’s Murray Guy and in 2008 at London’s Wilkinson. We’ll have what he’s having.