Dr. Kristin Makholm comes to MMAA as a respected curator, art historian, and teacher. A Milwaukee native, she received her B.A. from Northwestern University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, completing a dissertation in 1999 on the German Dada artist Hannah Höch. She has held curatorial and research positions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and The Saint Louis Art Museum, over time developing her specialty in the area of prints, drawings, and other works on paper. Her most recent museum post was as curator of prints and drawings at the Milwaukee Art Museum, where she organized exhibitions on Latin-American art, the prints of Roy Lichtenstein, nineteenth-century German prints and drawings, and the art of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
In 2004 she became director of exhibitions and galleries at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD), where she organized exhibitions, taught art history, and led two prominent regional arts fellowship programs, the McKnight Artist Fellowships for Visual Artists and the Jerome Foundation Fellowships for Emerging Artists. While at MCAD, Makholm revamped the faculty exhibitions and Made @ MCAD student shows, mounted popular exhibitions such as Graphic Noise (an exhibition of gigposters from around the country) and Shojo Manga: Girls Comics from Japan, and solo exhibitions of the work of photographer Roger Ballen, printmaker Linda Schwarz, illustrator Graham Rawle, and sculptor and painter Rico Gatson. As adjunct faculty, Makholm taught courses ranging from Dada and Surrealism to History of Prints and Mapping Modernity.
Articles and publications include Paradigm Shift: Kinji Akagawa at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (2009), “Going to B.A.T. for Vermillion Editions, Ltd,” in the Minneapolis Institute of Art catalog Vermillion Editions, Ltd.: 1977-1992 (2006), German Expressionist Prints: The Marcia and Granvil Specks Collection (2003), Nineteenth-Century German Prints and Drawings from the Milwaukee Art Museum (2002), and numerous essays on Minnesota art and artists for Jerome Foundation catalogs.
