Mark Godfrey (curator)
Mark Benjamin Godfrey is a British art historian, critic, and curator. He was previously senior curator of international art for Tate Modern, where he co-curated the 2017 exhibition "" and most recently organised retrospectives on Franz West and Olafur Eliasson. Early life and education. Godfrey was born in the Hampstead Garden Suburb of London. He is Jewish; his father was from Leeds and his mother was from South Africa. Godfrey pursued art curation from a young age. His father regularly took him to art galleries, while his mother taught him a tradition of collecting Judaica. He joined  the Habonim Dror youth movement and went to Israel in 1992 to work for Habonim. Godfrey earned his PhD in art history at University College London. His dissertation, titled "Abstraction and the Holocaust", analysed the works of American artists and architects to "see how they addressed the Holocaust in an abstract way, without using direct images." With the support of a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, he published his work in book form in 2007. Career. Godfrey was first a lecturer in art history and theory at the Slade School of Fine Art. In 2007, he joined the Tate Modern as curator  of contemporary art. Godfrey co-curated, with Nicholas Serota, an exhibition on Gerhard Richter in 2011. In 2014, he curated an exhibition on Richard Hamilton and co-curated exhibitions on Sigmar Polke (with Kathy Halbreich and Lanka Tattersall) and Christopher Williams (with Roxana Marcoci and Matthew Witkovsky). In 2017, Godfrey served on the jury of the 57th Venice Biennale with , , Amy Cheng, and Ntone Edjabe. Later that year he co-curated "" with Zoé Whitley. The exhibition examined the response of artists in America to the Civil Rights Movement and the subsequent Black Power movement. It featured more than sixty artists  including Frank Bowling, Betye Saar, and Barkley L. Hendricks. "ARTnews" highlighted "Soul of a Nation" as one of the most important art exhibitions of the decade. In 2019, Godfrey curated an exhibition on Franz West that included around two hundred works such as abstract sculptures, furniture, and collages. Later that year he organised a retrospective on Olafur Eliasson. Paintings of Ku Klux Klan figures by Philip Guston were set to be part of a retrospective exhibited at the National Gallery of Art, the Tate Modern, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2020  and 2021. In September 2020, the museums announced the postponement of the exhibition until 2024 because of "the racial justice movement that started in the US" following the murder of George Floyd. The decision generated controversy within the art world, and Godfrey, who was set to curate the exhibition at Tate Modern, was suspended from his position as senior curator after criticising the decision on social media. In March 2021, Godfrey announced his departure from the museum. Awards and honours. Godfrey won the Absolut Art Award in art writing in 2015. In 2020, he was recognised by the Association of  Art Museum Curators for his work on "Soul of a Nation".