Members can join us for an intimate gathering to get to know Bonnie Clearwater, Director and Chief Curator of NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale. It’s your opportunity to connect and learn more about Bonnie in a relaxed setting with wine and small bites. This event will be held at DV on March 6, 2026, at 6 pm.
Bonnie Clearwater’s professional entry into the art world, after completing her Master’s degree in art history at Columbia University, was Leonard Lauder’s first curator of his private collection. While working for Mr. Lauder, she became the first curator of The Mark Rothko Foundation in New York, for which she curated the first retrospective of Mark Rothko’s works on paper, which opened at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. in 1983.
She subsequently became Director of Art Programs of the Lannan Foundation in Los Angeles, and the Director of the Lannan Museum in Lake Worth, Florida. She became Director of NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale 10 years ago, after serving as the Director and Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) North Miami for over seventeen years.
Recognized as a force in defining new trends and directions in contemporary art through innovative original exhibitions and programs, Ms. Clearwater has presented the first major U.S. solo museum exhibitions for several of today’s most significant artists as well as historically significant exhibitions for Helen Frankenthaler, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, and Anselm Kiefer, among others. Known for her keen eye for the new and the local, she has consistently brought world-wide attention to the work of artists living and working in the state of Florida.
A noted art historian, Ms. Clearwater has written extensively on modern and contemporary art, including two books on Mark Rothko, and monographs on Helen Frankenthaler, Ed Ruscha, Roy Lichtenstein, and Frank Stella, among others, and is the editor and contributing author of two books on Marcel Duchamp, and contributing author to books on Anselm Kiefer, Tracey Emin, Anna Mendieta, and Julian Schnabel, to name a few. She and her husband, James Clearwater, founded the art book publishing company Grassfield Press in 1990.
Her most recent exhibition is Glory of the World: Color Field Painting, is on view at NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale through August 25.
