Juror

Veronica Roberts

Veronica Roberts is the John and Jill Freidenrich Director of the Cantor Arts Center. Before coming to Stanford, she was the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin since 2013. At the Blanton, she curated the nationally touring exhibitions Nina Katchadourian: Curiouser, which traveled to the Cantor in 2017, and Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt. Roberts also presented projects with artists Vincent Valdez, Lenka Clayton, Donald Moffett, Susan Philipsz, Ed Ruscha and Diedrick Brackens, and co-curated an exhibition of Charles White works jointly acquired by the Blanton and Art Galleries at Black Studies. Her final exhibition at the Blanton, Day Jobs, featuring work by Emma Amos, Larry Bell, Mark Bradford, Tishan Hsu, Jim Campbell, Genesis Belanger, and many others, was recently reviewed by The New York Times. Day Jobs will open at the Cantor in March of 2024.

In addition to curating exhibitions and producing scholarly publications at the Blanton, Roberts oversaw the reinstallation of the museums’s modern and contemporary collection, focusing on bolstering works by women and artists of color and helping to create dedicated spaces for video art and new works by contemporary artists. She also worked closely with Ellsworth Kelly to help realize the artist’s only building, Austin, the chapel-like space filled with monumental colored glass windows that opened in early 2018. She conceived the first-ever outdoor sound art gallery, which opened in 2023 on the Blanton grounds, and during the pandemic, co-created Texas Talks Art, a weekly 30-minute virtual conversation between a curator and artist to provide visibility to Texas artists and collaboration among museums across the state. In 2021-22, Roberts was a fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership.

Prior to her role at the Blanton, Roberts held curatorial positions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She also served as director of research for the Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing Catalogue Raisonné. She earned her MA from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and her BA in art history from Williams College in Massachusetts.