Karole Vail

Karole P. B. Vail was named Director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and Foundation Director for Italy in June 2017. Prior to this appointment, she served on the curatorial staff at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, where she worked since 1997. Vail’s most recent exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum was the retrospective Moholy-Nagy: Future Present (2016), which she organized in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. With the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti, she co-organized the retrospective Alberto Giacometti, presented at the Guggenheim in New York in 2018. Other Guggenheim exhibitions for which she has served as curator or cocurator include Peggy Guggenheim: A Centennial Celebration (1998); Il Ritrovo degli Artisti: A Brief History in Images of Peggy Guggenheim’s Collection (at Galleria Gottardo, Lugano, Switzerland, 2001); Art of Tomorrow: Hilla Rebay and Solomon R. Guggenheim (2005-06); and From Berlin to New York: Karl Nierendorf and the Guggenheim (2008). Among the many publications that Vail has written, cowritten, or edited are The Museum of Non-Objective Painting: Hilla Rebay and the Origins of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, conceived of by Vail, and published in 2009 on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Guggenheim Museum; Moholy-Nagy: Future Present (2016), which received an Honorable Mention in the 2017 Awards for Excellence administered by the Association of Art Museums Curators; Peggy Guggenheim: A Celebration (1998); and Art of Tomorrow: Hilla Rebay and Solomon R. Guggenheim (2005). Vail has also contributed texts and entries to catalogues such as Surrealism: Two Private Eyes (1999), Giorgio Armani (2000), and Kandinsky (2009). She has lectured at institutions including the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston; Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon; Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, East Hampton, New York; and New York University. She is a cofounder and codirector of Non-Objectif Sud, a not-for-profit artist residency and exhibition program in the south of France. Prior to joining the Guggenheim, Vail served as an archivist and researcher at Centro Di in Florence, a documentation center and publishing house specializing in art history, architecture, and decorative arts, and as an assistant curator on independent projects. Educated in the United Kingdom, she received a bachelor of arts from Durham University and a diploma in art history from the New Academy for Art Studies in London.
Photo credit: Matteo De Fina