CAROLYN CAMPAGNA KLEEFELD CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM

LEAD ASSOCIATE ART DIRECTOR
2022/2024

EXHIBITIONS

AHREE LEE: FABRICATION (2024)
DRAG SHOW (2023)
“UNTITLED” (L.A.), 1991 (2023)
LEE KRASNER: A THROUGH LINE (2023)
CLIFFORD PRICE KING: YESTERDAY AND BEYOND (2023)

Overview

At the Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum, serving as a Lead Associate Art Director across a two-year tenure bridging exhibition identity, spatial design, and institutional visual communication. Working in close collaboration with curators and visiting artists, built the visual frameworks through which research led, conceptually dense exhibitions were introduced to the public.

Team

Michaela Vitug
Shruti More

AHREE LEE: FABRICATION (2024)

Ahree Lee's Fabrication unravels a history hiding in plain sight. TEXTILE 1.0 is a flashing, modular structure that reads simultaneously as early mainframe and efficient kitchenette, parodying the utopian promises of mid-century design while quietly asking where society places its value. In Binary System, digital code is projected across hand-woven panels, drawing a direct line between the Jacquard loom's punch card logic and the foundations of computer programming, work that was until mid-century almost exclusively done by women. Tomorrow, Today closes the loop through film and advertisement clips, tracing how gender roles were culturally reinforced exactly as women were being erased from the technology they built. The visual identity was built to hold the weight of that argument, letting the work speak without softening its edge.

Art directed an immersive installation where a fictional domestic machine blinks like a mainframe, woven panels carry digital code, and 20th century film reels ask who really built the computer age.

View Ahree Lee Artist Series

DRAG SHOW (2023)

includes artists Nan Goldin, Mark Morrisroe, Jack Pierson, Tom Rubnitz, Linda Simpson, Tabboo!, and David Yarritu

Drag Show is a reclamation. Drawing from the vibrant and politically charged LGBT counterculture of 1980s and 1990s New York City, the exhibition positions drag not as spectacle but as a form of critique, resistance, and radical community-building. Works by Nan Goldin, Mark Morrisroe, Jack Pierson, Tom Rubnitz, Linda Simpson, Tabboo!, and David Yarritu map a cultural moment where difference was not tolerated but celebrated as foundation. At its heart, a 12 x 12 foot section of the AIDS Memorial Quilt anchors the room in grief, love, and collective memory. The visual identity was designed to honor both the joy and the weight of that history, without flattening either.

Art directed the visual identity for an exhibition celebrating drag as a powerful, political, and community-building art form across 1980s and 90s New York

Dotted Bunny, David Yarritu

Dotted Bunny, David Yarritu

Lypsinka with Oscar, David Yarritu

Mona Foot as Wonder Woman, David Yarritu

David Yarritu

Zaldy & Mthu, David Yarritu

Jack Pierson

Jack Pierson

Big Dee Drag Show Talk

View Press Release

“UNTITLED” (L.A.), 1991 (2023)

"Untitled" (L.A.), 1991 asks something rare of a museum visitor: to take something. Installed in Constance W. Glenn Court as a prologue to Drag Show, Felix Gonzalez-Torres' candy spill is a work that only becomes itself through participation. As visitors pick up a piece of candy, the shrinking pile quietly becomes a body losing weight to AIDS wasting syndrome, a meditation on consumption, and a disruption of the museum's instinct to freeze art in time. For Gonzalez-Torres, a Cuban American artist who died of AIDS-related causes, the viewer was never a passive witness but the final author of the work's meaning. Art direction held space for that exchange, building a visual context that let the simplicity of the gesture carry its full weight. On loan from Art Bridges Foundation.

Art directed the installation of a landmark Felix Gonzalez-Torres candy spill, where every piece of candy taken becomes an act of grief, intimacy, and quiet rebellion against how art is meant to be preserved.

View Felix Gonzalez Foundation Work

LEE KRASNER: A THROUGH LINE (2023)

Lee Krasner: A Through Line is not a linear story. It is a record of a woman who kept returning, revising, and building forward. The exhibition traced Krasner's practice from her early engagement with cubism through the breakthrough collages and gestural abstractions of the 1950s and 60s, drawing from the Museum's Gordon F. Hampton Collection alongside rarely exhibited loans. Number 2 (1951), on loan from Kasmin Gallery New York and shown only for the third time in its history, anchored a pivotal chapter alongside Black and White (1953), a collage stitched from scraps of her own work and Jackson Pollock's. Stretched Yellow (1955), painted directly over an earlier canvas, made the argument plainly: for Krasner, nothing was wasted. As Lead Associate Art Director, the visual framework was built to honor a practice defined by continuity, and to dispute the gendered critiques that once denied she had one.

Art directed an exhibition tracing the relentless creative cycles of Lee Krasner, a visionary whose work was denied, revised, and ultimately proved undeniable.

View Press Release
View Press Release

CLIFFORD PRICE KING: YESTERDAY AND BEYOND (2023)

Yesterday and Beyond marked a quiet institutional turning point. Organized as the first Los Angeles museum solo exhibition for LA-based photographer Clifford Prince King, the show arrived alongside the Museum's first photography acquisition by purchase in over a decade, King's For What It's Worth (2019). His large-format prints, made from scanned 35mm film negatives, carry the grain of their own making. The golden-hued compositions place Queer Black bodies in domestic spaces with a warmth and intentionality that connects to the history of figurative painting while filling a gap it never addressed. Neither documentary nor fiction, King's photographs create realities he and others need. Accompanied by a digital catalogue with an essay by Darnell Moore, the exhibition was organized by the Museum and shaped through art direction that understood the stakes of getting the presentation right.

Art directed the first Los Angeles museum solo exhibition for Clifford Prince King, whose golden hued 35mm film photographs build a visual archive of Queer Black intimacy that art history largely forgot to make

View Press Release