Carole Ann Klonarides (born 1951) is an American curator, video artist, writer and art consultant that has been based in New York and Los Angeles. She has worked in curatorial positions at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (1997–2000) and Long Beach Museum of Art (1991–95), curated exhibitions and projects for PS1 and Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), Laforet Museum (Tokyo), and Video Data Bank, among others, and been a consultant at the Getty Research Institute. Klonarides emerged as an artist among the loosely defined Pictures Generation group circa 1980; her video work (often in collaboration with Michael Owen as MICA-TV) has been presented in numerous museum exhibitions, including "Video and Language: Video As Language" (LACE, Renaissance Society, 1986–7), "documenta 8," "New Works for New Spaces: Into the Nineties," (Wexner Center for the Arts, inaugural exhibition, 1989), and "The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984" (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009), and at institutions such as MoMA, the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum, Contemporary Arts Center, the New Museum, The Kitchen, and School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2016). Her work belongs to the permanent collections of MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Getty Museum, Centre Pompidou, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Museu-Fundacão Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid), and National Gallery of Canada, and is distributed by the Video Data Bank and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI).
Early life and career
Klonarides was born in Washington, DC. In 1972, while an undergraduate at Virginia Commonwealth University, she moved to New York City and attended the year-long Whitney Independent Study Program. She completed her BFA in painting and printmaking (1973) while still living in New York, and started working at various galleries, including OK Harris Gallery. Klonarides began exploring video while working at the Brooklyn Museum Art School in the early 1970s; she organized a video panel, "A New Generation of Artists?" that included Lizzie Borden, Paula Cooper, Neil Jenney, and Joel Shapiro, and made her first video, Post-Show Depression, in 1975, documenting young artists Judy Rifka, Bill Jensen, Barbara Schwartz, and Porfirio DiDonna taking their first one-person shows down. She later worked late night clubs as a VJ (video jockey) and presented video programs in galleries, lofts, and as program director for the Artists' Television Network on Manhattan Cable Television. In 1980, while attending the New School for Social Research (MA, media studies, 1983), Klonarides met Michael Owen and they formed MICA-TV, a video production company focused on making videos with contemporary artists.
Curating
Klonarides has worked as an art and media curator for more than four decades; she has been listed among the west's top curators by the Los Angeles Times and CBS Los Angeles. In 1983, she curated the show "Borrowed Time" at Baskerville + Watson, combining works by known artists Nam June Paik, Norman Rockwell and William Wegman with those of then-emerging artists, such as Louise Lawler, Richard Prince, and Aura Rosenberg; the show led to her being hired as gallery director and organizing exhibitions of Dike Blair, Carroll Dunham, Deborah Kass, and Sherrie Levine, among others from 1983 to 1987. She also organized "TV: For Real" for the Laforet Museum in Tokyo (1989) and curated the video programs "It's Evening in America" (1989) on the Reagan years and "The Alternative Voice" for Video Data Bank's "Video Drive-In" in New York's Central Park (1990).