JOHN B. RAVENAL
The Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
John Ravenal has been Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) since 1998. Prior to VMFA, he was Associate Curator of Twentieth-Century Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA), where he worked for seven years. At the PMA, Ravenal curated the retrospective of work by Sidney Goodman; Ian Hamilton Finlay’s first U.S. museum exhibition; and the Video Gallery series. He also co-curated site-specific projects by Sherrie Levine, Lawrence Weiner, Richard Long and Rirkrit Tiravanija.
His exhibitions at VMFA include Vanitas: Meditations on Life and Death in Contemporary Art, Outer & Inner Space, featuring video installations by Shirin Neshat, Pipilotti Rist, and Jane & Louise Wilson in the context of single channel videos from the 1960s and ‘70s; and Robert Lazzarini’s first solo museum show. Most recently, he organized Artificial Light (commissioned work using light as the primary material), which opened at VCUarts’ Anderson Gallery in Richmond and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art during Art Basel Miami Beach. Ravenal did his graduate work in Art History at Columbia University.