We are pleased to announce the curator for Wichita’s 2010 River City Biennale is Hesse McGraw.

Hesse McGraw is a curator, writer and artist working as curator at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska. He was the founding director and curator of Paragraph, a contemporary art gallery operating under the non-profit Urban Culture Project in downtown Kansas City, Missouri. He is the former assistant director of Max Protetch gallery in New York, City and former senior editor of Review, a Kansas City-based visual culture magazine. He has served as a lecturer in the Interdisciplinary department of the Kansas City Art Institute and frequently serves as a guest lecturer, critic and juror for fine art and architecture schools and organizations throughout the US.

Alongside producing two dozens exhibits and projects over three years at Paragraph, he has curated exhibitions for FLEX Self Storage (Topeka, Kansas), The New Genres Festival (Tulsa), The Stray Show (Chicago), Guild and Greyshkul (NYC), -scopeMiami, RARE (NYC), Rocket gallery (London) and White Flag Projects (St. Louis). He regularly contributes to publications including Art Papers, Dots & Quotes, Empty magazine, The Kansas City Star, RES, Review, Tank, and Ten by Ten. He has written exhibition essays for artists including Ryoji Ikeda, Tobias Wong, Steve Mumford, Eric von Robertson and many others.

Organized by gallery directors Ann Resnick (Project) and Elizabeth Stevenson (Fisch Haus), the 2nd River City Biennale is scheduled to open in the spring of 2010. The River City Biennale seeks to shift perceptions; locally, regionally and nationally, about art and artists in Wichita. Hesse McGraw has been asked to curate an exhibit that challenges notions of complacency in our region and to place the art of Wichita in a broader context–one that connects what’s going on here with what’s going on nationally, and even internationally, in the contemporary art world.

More information on RCB deadlines and how to submit images and proposals will be addressed in subsequent press releases.