Brown Arts

Kate Kraczon is the Director of Exhibitions and Chief Curator of the Brown Arts Institute (BAI) / David Winton Bell Gallery (The Bell) at Brown University. Joining Brown in fall 2019 as Curator, Kraczon now oversees the Brown Arts Institute’s exhibition program, which includes The Bell and its collection of over 7,000 works in List Art Center, the Cohen Gallery in the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, and Brown’s robust Public Art program. As a member of the BAI leadership team, Kraczon builds programs across campus and within the Lindemann Performing Arts Center. Kraczon is also involved in many aspects of the BAI’s academic program. Since joining the BAI, Kraczon has curated solo exhibitions with artists such as Franklin Williams, Elisabeth Subrin, Savannah Knoop, Jules Gimbrone, Hartman Deetz, and a two-person exhibition with Harry Gould Harvey IV and Faith Wilding (all 2021). Upcoming projects include solo projects with Julien Creuzet and a newly commissioned installation with Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Basel Abbas (co-curated with Thea Quiray Tagle). 

Previously the Laporte Associate Curator at the Institute for Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania from 2008-2019, Kraczon organized over thirty exhibitions while at ICA, including Ree Morton’s first major retrospective in the United States in over three decades (2018), and collaborated with ICA curator Alex Klein on an exhibition of work by Suki Seokyeong Kang (2018). She curated the first museum exhibition of work by Becky Suss, as well as a survey of Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere’s collaborative practice. She organized Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s project The Incidental Insurgents (2012–present) at ICA (2015), and commissioned the major video installation Easternsports (2014) by Alex Da Corte and Jayson Musson. In 2014 Kraczon oversaw the museum’s fiftieth anniversary exhibition, ICA@50. 

Kraczon was awarded a commendation for her Ree Morton exhibition from the Sotheby’s Prize in 2017, given to curators “to realize an exhibition that breaks new ground.” Her presentation of Dear Nemesis, Nicole Eisenman 1993–2013 (originated at CAM, St. Louis) was awarded Best Monographic Museum Exhibition International Art Critics Association in 2014. A long-time supporter of regional artists and artist-run institutions, she was a founding board member of RAIR (Recycled Artists in Residence) in Philadelphia, PA, from 2014-2021, and has been a founding board member of FR MOCA (Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art) since 2020.