Jens Hofmann Appointed New Deputy Director of the Jewish Museum

By the end of this year, curator Jens Hofmann will become the new deputy director of the Jewish Museum in New York City, according to the leadership of that cultural institution. Founded in 1904, the museum contains 27,000 objects that are part of our universal history and that include a collection of works that expand from ancient times to the most contemporary artistic manifestations.

Director of the Wattis San Francisco Institute for Contemporary Arts since 2007, Hofmann has organized important international exhibitions, like the 1998 Berlin Biennial, the 2007 Lyon Biennial, and the 2011 Istanbul Biennial. Between 2002 and 2007, he was director of exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.

Being the prolific curator that he is, New York is familiar territory for him, as he has worked for the Guggenheim and has curated a large number of exhibitions in New York galleries, including Exhibitions of an Exhibition, at Kasey Kaplan, in 2003. Last summer, Hofmann received recognition for his exhibition entitled Marxism, inspired by the influence of the Marx brothers in the Arts.

This appointment does not come as a surprise, at a time when New York and its museums are working to strengthen their cultural programs around contemporary art—relying on conceptual and visual themes that Jens Hofmann knows very well, as he has worked with them since the beginning of his career.