Milena Kalinovska

Milena Kalinovska (born 1948) is a curator of visual arts and art educator. She has Czech and Russian ancestry, and is a triple national with British, American and Czech citizenship. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in its second year, 1985.

She was director of public programs and education at the

Kalinovska has worked with artists including Richard Deacon, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Nan Goldin, Antony Gormley, Magdalena Jetelova, Isaac Julien, Cildo Meireles, Annette Messager, Mariko Mori, Ilya Kabakov, On Kawara, Jiri Kolar, Stanislav Kolibal, Edward Krasinski, Richard Prince, Adriena Simotova, Nancy Spero, Bill Viola, Kara Walker, and Lawrence Weiner.

Early and personal life

Kalinovska was born in

She grew up in the

She married Jan Vaňous in 1986; he is a Yale-educated economist and consultant who was also born in Czechoslovakia, and moved to the US in 1970. They have two children, Milena V Vaňous and Jan M Vaňous.

Career

Kalinovska was exhibitions director at the Riverside Studios in London from during 1981-86, and then associate director for exhibitions during 1986-89.

After moving to the US in 1986, she was an adjunct curator at the

Kalinovska has also worked as an independent curator organizing numerous exhibitions including "Beyond Preconceptions: The Sixties Experiment", which toured major museums in Europe, South America, and the USA, and "Art into Life: Russian Constructivism 1914 to 1935", at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and Henry Art Gallery in Seattle.^[2] She was one of four curators of the 2004 Gwangju Biennale in South Korea, and has served on the national advisory committee of Art:21 for PBS. She has organized many international exhibitions as an independent curator.^[3]

She became Director of modern and contemporary art collection at the

Awards

Kalinovska is the recipient of several awards including the Tomas Alva Negri Award for "Beyond Preconceptions: The Sixties Experiment", and the Penny McCall Foundation Grant established to honour curatorial efforts supporting the visual arts in the US. She was honoured by the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities (under Bill Clinton) for "Docent-Teens," the youth museum guide program at the ICA, Boston.

Kalinovska was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1985.^[4] She is one of only two non-artists ever to be nominated for the Turner Prize. Her personal papers from her time at Riverside Studios are at the Tate Archives, London.^[5]

References

• A Pilgrimage to Prague, The Boston Globe, 16 January 1994
• Former ICA Director Milena Kalinovska, Berkshire Fine Arts, 19 September 2015