In December 2014, Charlotta Kotik gave a gallery-based talk in conjunction with “Chris Ofili: Night and Day.” Kotik, an independent curator and former Curator and Chair of the Contemporary Art Department at the Brooklyn Museum, where she organized “Sensation” in 1999, briefly addressed the tumultuous events that surrounded Ofili’s presentation as part of that exhibition. She then turned to a discussion of the sculptures and three dimensional aspects of the various works included in the exhibition at the New Museum, whose rich iconography connects them with both historical masterpieces and contemporary art practices.

Outside the Box features gallery-based talks given by guest speakers over the course of a season. In this program, lecturers with diverse disciplinary backgrounds and affinities address the New Museum’s current exhibition(s) in forty-five- to sixty-minute presentations taking place exclusively in the Museum’s galleries. As a way to emphasize the Museum’s strong commitment to new art and new ideas, Outside the Box lecturers speak about the exhibitions or themes emergent in artists’ works from the various positions they occupy, be they academic, personal, political, etc., and engage in rich investigations that illuminate and probe the Museum’s current exhibition program.

Charlotta Kotik, a native of Prague, first came to the US to work at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY. During the course of her career, she has organized over one hundred museum exhibitions, presenting works by artists as diverse as Mariko Mori, Kerry James Marshall, John Cage, Jenny Holzer, and Robert Longo. From 1992 through 2007, she was Curator and Chair of the Contemporary Art Department at the Brooklyn Museum where she established the Grand Lobby projects in order to provide exhibition opportunities for installation-based work by artists such as Martin Puryear and Petah Coyne, among others. In the 1980s, she initiated the “Working in Brooklyn Series” to document the energy of the nascent Brooklyn art scene and in l993, as the US commissioner for Venice Biennale, she presented works by Louise Bourgeois in an exhibition that later traveled internationally. Since 2000, Kotik has participated in the Jindrich Chalupecky Award, an important recognition for visual artists in the Czech Republic that has become a model for art programs in nine other post-Communist countries. Presently, Kotik works as a writer, lecturer, and independent curator, and facilitates various project for galleries, alternative spaces, and museums. She teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York during the spring semester and at the Academy of Art, Architecture and Design in Prague during the winter semester.