Constance Lewallen (1939–2022) was an American curator. She was known for her support of Conceptual art and West Coast artists. Lewallen was born and raised in New York City. She received her BA from Mount Holyoke College and her MA from California State University, San Diego. She was an adjunct curator at the University of California, Berkeley, Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. In 1996 she curated Jay DeFeo: Selected Works 1952-1989 for Moore College of Art in Philadelphia, which traveled to the UC Berkeley Art Museum. As senior curator at BAM she curated many major exhibitions including A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s, all of which were accompanied by catalogs and toured nationally and internationally. Beginning in the 1980s, Lewallen was known for her exacting shows that repositioned the history of Conceptual art of the 1960s and ’70s so that it was no longer so New York–centric. She has been credited with helping to introduce figures like Stephen Kaltenbach, Paul Kos, Suzanne Lacy, and Lynn Hershman Leeson, all of whom were at one point lesser known, to the canon.
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Former Adjunct Curator at University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
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