Photo: Topher Cox, Boston, MA.

Tagged by Boston Magazine as the “cowboy curator of cutting edge contemporary art,” Bill Arning has been the Director of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston since April 2009.

Born in New York Arning began his role in the arts as a member of the late 70’s punk band, The Student Teachers. From 1985-1996 he worked as the director and chief curator of White Columns, an alternative art space in New York City. There he organized the first New York exhibitions for many significant American and international artists of the period such as WAITING FOR INFO.

Prior to joining the CAMH Arning served for eight years, as the Curator at MIT List Visual Arts Center, where he organized such exhibitions as America Starts Here – Ericson and Ziegler (2006), which was awarded the first prize for best monographic show in a Boston museum by the International Association of Art Critics. He was also a member of the Sensorium four-person curatorial team that organized MIT’s major project on how technology has altered the human senses that was also first prize by the critics association in 2006-2007.

Arning has also worked as a freelance writer and independent curator and has had articles published in Aperture, Time Out New York, Modern Painters, The Village Voice, Art in America, Trans, Out and Parkett. He has authored significant interpretive essays for catalogs such as Chantal Akerman: Moving Through Time and Space (2008), Christian Jankowski – Everything Fell Together (2006) and most recently Matthew Day Jackson: The Immeasurable Distance, which will travel to the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston in October 2009.