Noted Curator Kathleen Goncharov Dies at 73

Noted Curator Kathleen Goncharov Dies at 73

Kathleen Goncharov, who launched her career at Linda Goode’s pathbreaking New York galleryJust Above Midtownand went on to serve as US Commissioner for the FiftiethVenice Biennale, died in her Boca Raton, Florida, home on December 31. She was seventy-three. Goncharov was widely esteemed for her staunch advocacy of such artists as El Anatsui, Petah Coyne, Chitra Ganesh, David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, Mona Hatoum, Barkley Hendricks, William Kentridge, Hew Locke, Whitfield Lovell, Lorraine O’Grady, Pat Steir, Mickalene Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, and Fred Wilson. She selected Wilson to represent the US at the 2003 Venice Biennale. Those she championed were united by a common commitment to the interrogation of history, power, and institutional structures. “As a curator I am more interested in political and conceptual work,” shetold Art Plugged’s Clare Gemima in 2022. “I’m very political myself, and I want art to have something to say.”

Kathleen Goncharov was born on February 24, 1952, in Monroe, Michigan. Especially drawn to culture and the visual arts as a child, she earned a BA in studio art and an MA in Asian and Near Eastern history from Central Michigan University before obtaining her master’s in museum practice and art history from the University of Michigan. She moved to New York and in 1980 began organizing shows at J.A.M., known for highlighting the work of contemporary Black artists at a time when few galleries did. She next undertook the role of director of exhibitions at public art initiative Creative Time, where she staged projects in disused spaces across New York City.

In 1987, Goncharov was appointed curator of the New School Art Collection. She occupied the position through 2000, commissioning Martin Puryear to design the school’s Vera List Courtyard. After securing a National Endowment for the Arts grant for the project, the school sued the organization for having added an anti-obscenity clause to the grant requirements. In 2002, she served as US Commissioner of the Venice Biennale; Fred Wilson’s pavilion, “Speak of Me as I Am,” explored the role played by Black Africans in Renaissance Venice, at the time the world’s most cosmopolitan and ethnically diverse city.

After curatorial stints at the MIT List Visual Arts Center and the Nasher Center of Art at Duke University, Goncharov in 2007 was named executive director/artistic director of the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions at Rutgers University, where she was tasked with selecting artists to collaborate with the center’s master printers and papermakers on new editions, a number of which she placed in major institutional collections. In 2012, she accepted the role of curator at the Boca Raton Museum of Art in South Florida. She curated more than thirty exhibitions at the institution before retiring in 2025.

Among Goncharov’s talents was her ability to engage audiences. “Often, the viewer would end up feeling like they actually had a conversation with the artist,” Petah Coyne told the Art Newspaper. “When my work was shown by Kathy, years later people would meet me and they would say to me, ‘Oh yes, I’ve spoken with you before,’ but I had never met them. Then they would tell me they saw one of my works in a show Kathy curated and that they felt like they spoke to me through their conversation with my work there.”

Gonchrarov maintained her own art practice for the duration of her career as a curator. She had her first solo show, of abstract colored-pencil drawings inspired by the Tuscan landscape, in 2022 at New York’s Olympia gallery. Goncharov credited her habit of doodling while on the telephone as a young gallerist with fostering the fluid, curving shapes she created.

“Kathy was an artist at heart, and this sensibility shaped everything she did,” artist Robert Ransick, a friend of Goncharov, told Hyperallergic. “It enabled her to recognize talent early and to intuit exactly how to support artists at pivotal moments in their careers.”

Goncharov is survived by her longtime partner, Charles Doria; her siblings, Janet Sterling and Earl Shew; and their families.