Jay Sanders joins the team at New York's Whitney Museum

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The Whitney Museum of American Art has announced that Jay Sanders is joining the Museum’s staff as a curator. Mr Sanders, whose particular expertise is in the performing arts, begins at the Whitney this month

Adam D. Weinberg, Alice Pratt Brown Director, commented:

Jay is a visionary curator with an exceptional record. His role will be the first full-time position that includes the performing arts, an area that has long been of immense importance to the Whitney. We’re proud of our great history of presenting the performing arts at the Museum and we’re confident that Jay is going to extend and expand that history in marvelous ways in the galleries, theater, and black box of the new downtown Museum. We’re deeply grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for making this appointment possible.

As part of the 2012 Biennial, which Sanders co-curated with Whitney curator Elisabeth Sussman, the fourth floor of the Whitney was transformed into a large open space dedicated to a wide array of performances and residencies by a number of Biennial artists. These included the choreographers Sarah Michelson (who received the 2012 Bucksbaum Award for her Biennial work) and Michael Clark; film and video artist Charles Atlas; rock musicians The Red Krayola; playwright and theatre director Richard Maxwell; the Scottish-based group Arika, hosting a programme centred on experimental sound and listening; mezzo-soprano Alicia Hall Moran and jazz pianist Jason Moran with a number of guest artists, writers, and musicians; Biennial artist Kai Althoff performing in a play by Yair Oelbaum; and visual artist K8 Hardy, who staged a full-fledged fashion runway show.

The Whitney is extremely grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a generous three-year grant to support the Whitney’s performing arts program. This funding enables the Museum to appoint a curator who will research and plan performing arts programming over the next three years in the Breuer building, as well as in the new Whitney building downtown, scheduled to open in 2015.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation program for Art History, Conservation, and Museums is designed to help excellent institutions build and sustain their capacity to undertake serious scholarship on their permanent collections; to preserve these collections; and to share the results of their work in appropriate ways with scholarly and other audiences.