Clara Hargittay

...is an independent curator and art consultant. She has been professionally involved in the arts in Canada since the 1980s in a variety of positions, as an art writer and editor, curator and art historical researcher, festival director and programmer. A graduate of the University of Toronto in Fine Art History, her special interest and expertise are Canadian and international contemporary art, Central and Eastern European art and contemporary First Nations art in North America. Over the years Clara Hargittay's career has had many high points. After several years as editor of artmagazine, a leading national visual arts review, she joined the Art Gallery of Ontario and in 1989 she's won the support of the institution for a major international exhibition initiative. She was co-curator with Dr. Roald Nasgaard of the exhibition, Free Worlds: Metaphors and Realities in Contemporary Hungarian Art, which opened at the AGO in the fall of 1991 and traveled in North America.

Clara Hargittay also initiated and was director of a Toronto-wide multidisciplinary arts festival that featured contemporary Hungarian art and culture in a broader context, with the aim to make Canadian audiences aware of the intellectual forces behind the tremendous social and political changes in Central and Eastern Europe at the time. The Hungary Reborn arts festival, of which the Free Worlds exhibition was the central part, was the first major cultural event in North America that explored the reality of the New World Order after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was also the first international arts festival in Toronto that was developed and presented not as a public relations initiative by a foreign government, but through grass roots efforts and broad participation of an ex-patriot Hungarian community.

Since 1992, Clara Hargittay has been working as an independent curator and cultural consultant, and has been involved with many other exciting projects, often in highly creative and challenging roles, such as researching a multidisciplinary Cuban arts project in Havana (commissioned by John Cripton on behalf of the National Arts Centre, Ottawa), and navigating municipal politics and building connections with diverse communities as an arts and entertainment programming consultant at the Living Arts Centre Mississauga.

In 2003 Clara Hargittay curated the exhibition The Political is Personal: A First Nations Perspective for the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts at the Lieutenant Governor's suite in Queen's Park. She is a research associate of the Centre for Contemporary Canadian Art, the web based Canadian Art Database project (ccca.ca).

Over the span of her career Clara Hargittay developed considerable expertise not only in arts programming, but also in project development and project management. From its inception, she worked as a cultural consultant with the Toronto International Art Fair (2000 and 2001) organizing featured exhibitions and educational programs.

In the spring of 2005 Clara Hargittay was invited by the organizers of TIAF to curate an exhibition of installation art for the public spaces of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre during the Art Fair in November, 3 - 7, 2005. Recognizing the potential of the occasion and the suitability of the venue for the presentation of cutting edge interactive media art, she invited Thom Sokoloski, a well known creator of imaginative opera and multi media theatrical productions and former artistic director of the McLuhan Festival of the Future, to collaborate on the project. The result is INTERACTIVE 2005, the inaugural edition of A Celebration of Interactive Arts at TIAF.

Contact Information:

8 Gifford Street, Toronto, M5A 3J1 / 416-922-1676 / e-mail: clarahargittay@rogers.com

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