Oliver was a program specialist in charge of administrating grants for
National Endowment for the Arts from 1988 to 1995. She also worked at the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago for five years directing the Visiting Artists Program. Oliver joined CAMH in 2000 as associate curator and was promoted to full curator in 2006, then senior curator in 2010. During that time Cassel Oliver helped curate a number of successful touring exhibits including
Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art (2012) and
Cinema Remixed and Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image (2008). In June 2017, she joined the Virginia Museum of Fine Art as curator of modern and contemporary art, Oliver's first show at the VMFA has been announced for January 2019, featuring painter
Howardena Pindell and co-curated with
Naomi Beckwith of the
Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. She became editor-in-chief of the
Benezit Dictionary of Artists in January 2020.
Honors In 2006, Oliver won a
Getty Curatorial Research Fellowship. In 2011, she won the
David C. Driskell Prize from
Atlanta's
High Museum of Art, a $25,000 prize recognizing contributions of an artist or scholar in the field of the art of the
African diaspora.
Exhibitions •
The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse, VMFA, Richmond, Virginia, 2021 •
Angel Otero: Everything and Nothing, CAMH, Houston, TX, 2016 •
Right Here, Right Now: Houston, Volume 2, CAMH, Houston, TX, 2016 •
Jennie C. Jones: Compilation, CAMH, Houston, TX, 2015 •
Trenton Doyle Hancock: Skin and Bones, 20 Years of Drawing, 2014 •
Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, 2013 •
Hand+Made: The Performative Impulse in Art and Craft, 2010 •
Cinema Remixed & Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image since 1970, 2007 •
Splat Boom Pow! The Influence of Cartoons in Contemporary Art, 2003 ==References==