Chief Curator Brian Wallis to Step Down

The International Center of Photography (ICP) announced today that Brian Wallis, Deputy Director of Exhibitions and Collections and Chief Curator since 1999, will step down at the end of February.

Executive Director Mark Lubell says, “Brian Wallis has had a long and distinguished career at ICP. He came on board before our renovated Midtown galleries opened in 2000 and has been instrumental to our success over the last 15 years. Brian assembled and led a superb staff of curators, whose trailblazing exhibitions and significant acquisitions have deepened our understanding of photography and its history. We will build on this foundation in our new galleries on the Bowery.”

Wallis has led the Department of Exhibitions and Collections since joining ICP in September 1999. He established a dynamic curatorial program that focused on contemporary perspectives on photography, while critically reexamining the history of photojournalism and documentary photography for which the institution is best known. During his successful tenure, ICP presented more than 150 exhibitions and installations and acquired more than 20,000 photographs. Wallis’s acquisitions strategy will continue to inform ICP’s collection development well into the future.

Many of the exhibitions presented under his leadership focused on explicitly political issues, such as Abu Ghraib, the war in Iraq, 9/11, Occupy Wall Street, Hurricane Sandy, rural poverty, and apartheid in South Africa. Wallis curated many notable exhibitions, including Strangers: The First ICP Triennial of Photography and Video (with Edward Earle, Christopher Phillips, and Carol Squiers, 2003); Larry Clark (2005); America and the Tintype (2009); Miroslav Tichy (2010); Weegee: Murder Is My Business (2012); and JFK November 22, 1963: A Bystander’s View of History (2013). Among the acquisitions made during his tenure, perhaps the most significant was the 2007 recovery of the Mexican Suitcase, a long-lost cache of 4,300 negatives made during the Spanish Civil War by photojournalists Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and Chim. Prior to joining ICP, Wallis served at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art. He plans to work as curator for the Walther Collection and is currently organizing a major exhibition and publication titled “The Order of Things: Photography from The Walther Collection,” which will open at the Walther Collection museum in Neu-Ulm/Burlafingen, Germany, in May.

Curator Christopher PhilIips and Kristen Lubben, Curator and Associate Director of Exhibitions, will guide ICP’s exhibitions department during the transition to a new Museum space on the Bowery and its expanded collection facility at Mana Contemporary. ICP has begun the search for Wallis’s successor.