Cathleen Chaffee, PhD

Charles Balbach Chief Curator

A headshot of a white woman wearing a black shirtDr. Cathleen Chaffee joined the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in January 2014 and has been Chief Curator since September 2017. A strong believer in the power of art and artists to help us learn from the past and envision better futures, Chaffee leads the Buffalo AKG’s curators in stewarding exhibitions, public art projects, collections, and acquisitions. Within this rubric, the Buffalo AKG’s Curatorial Department oversees additional departments working with collections, including those responsible for the museum’s Archives and Special Collections, Art Preparation, Imaging and Visual Resources, Public Art, and Registration. In the spirit of the Buffalo AKG’s founding mission to support the work of contemporary artists, many of the exhibitions curated by Chaffee have marked artists’ first US museum surveys and retrospectives.

At the Buffalo AKG, Chaffee recently organized the touring retrospective exhibitions Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon (2024) and Marisol: A Retrospective (2023–25). She was the co-curator of Stanley Whitney: The Italian Paintings (April 23–November 27, 2022), an official collateral event of the 59th Venice Biennale, presented by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum at the Palazzo Tiepolo Passi, Venice, Italy. 

In coordination with teams from across the Buffalo AKG, Chaffee oversees the museum’s stewardship of the estate of Marisol (1930-2016), the iconic Venezuelan and American Pop artist. In one of the most important bequests from an artist in the museum’s history, Marisol left more than 700 artworks, her papers, and her copyright to the AKG in 2016. 

Chaffee has organized exhibitions and authored accompanying publications for projects including Clyfford Still: A Legacy for Buffalo, which helped inaugurate the new AKG campus in 2023; Introducing Tony Conrad: A Retrospective (2018); Joe Bradley (2017); Shade: Clyfford Still / Mark Bradford (2016); Erin Shirreff (2016); Eija-Liisa Ahtila: Ecologies of Drama (2015–16); and Overtime: The Art of Work (2015); as well as exhibitions dedicated to Christine Sun Kim and Thomas Mader, Tamar Guimarães and Kasper Akhøj, Jacob Kassay, Eric N. Mack, Willa Nasatir, Matt Hoyt, Marie Lorenz, and Ellie Ga, among others. She co-organized Anthony McCall: Dark Rooms, Solid Light (2019); Looking at Tomorrow: Light and Language from The Panza Collection, 1967–1990 (2015–16); and Screen Play: Life in an Animated World (2015)

Chaffee’s books and essays have addressed the work of Bas Jan Ader, Richard Artschwager, Carol Bove, Mark Bradford, Marcel Broodthaers, Hanne Darboven, Gabriel Kuri, Marisol, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, and Stanley Whitney, among many others. Her writing has been published in magazines such as Artforum, Frieze, Contemporary, Mousse, and Manifesta Journal. Chaffee has lectured widely on contemporary art and artists as well as topics including language and duration in minimal and conceptual art, the representation of labor in postwar art, artist-curated exhibitions, the stewardship of artists’ legacies, and the home and “home-like” in art after Marcel Duchamp.

Chaffee was Horace W. Goldsmith Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Yale University Art Gallery from 2010 to 2014 and previously held curatorial positions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Chaffee received her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and was awarded a 2008 Fulbright Fellowship to Belgium to complete research for her dissertation, Décors: Marcel Broodthaers’s Late Exhibition Practice 1974–75. She received her MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. In 2018, Chaffee was the VIA Art Fund’s Curatorial Fellow.

Dr. Cathleen Chaffee in conversation with Mark Bradford as part of the Emerging Voices in Contemporary Art Lecture Series. Photograph by Tom Loonan.