Jane Alison has been appointed as Head of Visual Arts at The Barbican Centre in London. She will up the role with immediate effect. Alison has been Senior Curator at the Barbican since 2007. During which time she has overseen the work of the curatorial team, as well as curating The House of Viktor & Rolf (2008) and The Surreal House (2010). More recently Jane was responsible for realising The Bride and the Bachelors: Duchamp with Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg and Johns (2013) while also having a key role in shaping Barbican’s wider complementary Dancing Around Duchamp season.
Louise Jeffreys, Director of Arts, Barbican Centre, said : “We are absolutely delighted to be appointing Jane to Head of Visual Arts. She is a hugely talented and creative curator, an excellent manager and her passion for the Barbican is an inspiration. She has played a leading role in the Barbican’s visual arts programme for many years, and I look forward to working with her in this new role to develop the art galleries’ programme into the future.”
Jane Alison, Head of Visual Arts said: “I am thrilled to be entrusted with the role of leading visual arts at the Barbican, working closely with an exceptionally dedicated team for whom I have the utmost respect. We will build on our already distinctive programme; commissioning artists to make work for the Curve, and in the Art Gallery focusing on timely and art historically important exhibitions of twentieth and twenty-first century art, architecture, design and photography. As part of a world class art centre, we are uniquely placed to champion the increasingly fluid cross-disciplinary nature of artistic expression. I have a profound belief in the power of art to enrich and transform lives and so I would particularly like us to find new ways of working with artists, while at the same time making it a priority to encourage more young people to engage with all that we do.”