Tom Eccles is Executive Director of the Center for Curatorial Studies and the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, a position he has held since 2005. At CCS Bard, Eccles built the Hessel Museum of Art, expanded the research facilities and is currently building the Keith Haring Wing, which will include greater teaching, library, archive and art storage space. He works closely with the founder, Marieluise Hessel, to build the art collection of more than 3,000 works held at CCS Bard. With the CCS Bard Board, he has also created a substantial endowment to support the museum and its graduate program. As a curator at CCS Bard, Eccles has collaborated with artists Anne Collier, Rachel Harrison, VALIE EXPORT, Amy Sillman, Haim Steinbach, Leigh Ledare, Ho Tzu Nyen and Walead Beshty, among many others. The campus also has public works by Cosima von Bonin, Franz West, Martin Creed, Mark Handforth and Olafur Eliasson. A new work by Rirkrit Tiravanija will be added this spring.
Prior to CCS Bard, Eccles was the Director of New York’s Public Art Fund for ten years, during which time he realized over one hundred projects across the city, from site-specific projects by Ilya Kabakov and Rachel Whiteread, to historical surveys with artists such as Keith Haring, Tony Smith, and Roy Lichtenstein, to monumental sculptures by Louise Bourgeois, Jeff Koons, Nam June Paik, and Takashi Murakami at Rockefeller Center, to community gardens by Alison and Betye Saar and Vito Acconci and performance/film projects with Pierre Huyghe and Tony Oursler.
Eccles has been a curator at the Park Avenue Armory since 2005, when he assisted in transforming the once-disused space into a cultural hub, and has organized major exhibitions by Ernesto Neto, Paul McCarthy, Hito Steyerl, Nick Cave, and Carrie Mae Weems.
Since 2006, Eccles has been an adviser to the Luma Foundation in Arles, working closely with the philanthropist Maja Hoffmann to curate numerous exhibitions, and in Qatar since 2018, as an adviser to Sheikha Al Mayassa, where he has organized more than thirty installations of public art including works by Ugo Rondinone, Isa Genzken, Olafur Eliasson and others. He is also engaged with the Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation in Turin, Italy, where he recently curated a major new public installation in the rural village of Roddino by Liam Gillick and Hito Steyerl.
Eccles was the organizer of the Frieze talks program in New York for six years beginning in 2014, which included speakers such as Fred Moten, Pussy Riot, and Eileen Myles. He has written for ArtReview, Art in America, and Parkett.
June 28, 2005 was officially proclaimed “Tom Eccles Day” in New York City by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. Eccles received a master’s degree in philosophy and Italian from the University of Glasgow (First Class), studied semiotics and aesthetics at the University of Bologna (with Umberto Eco) and received an honorary degree from the University of Gothenburg. He taught critical theory at Glasgow School of Art. Upon graduating from the University of Glasgow, he built at art center for people with disabilities called Project Ability.
Phone: 845-758-7598 Fax: 845-758-2442 E-mail: eccles@bard.edu
