Edith Devaney

8th October 2021

Edith Devaney recently took on the newly created position of Managing Director and Curator for David Hockney Inc. and the David Hockney Foundation. She is also Editor in Chief of the David Hockney Catalogue Raisonné. Formerly the Contemporary Curator and Head of Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, Edith Devaney has transformed the Academy’s Summer Exhibition over the past twenty years into the popular success it is today. 

She also originated and curated a number of exhibitions at the Academy including Jasper Johns; ‘Something Resembling Truth’ in 2017 which travelled to the Broad, in Los Angeles;  Abstract Expressionism, both at the Royal Academy in 2016, and the Guggenheim Bilbao in 2017; and  the David Hockney exhibition, 82 Portraits and one still-life, which toured to three venues across Europe and the US, and was also responsible for the curation of the Hockney landscape exhibition, A Bigger Picture, in 2012.  Other exhibitions include retrospectives on Allan Jones and Bill Woodrow, a survey of Richard Diebenkorn and an exhibition of the work of Phyllida Barlow. She co-curated a series of GSK Contemporary Exhibitions in the Academy’s Burlington Gardens building and was responsible for the Annenberg Courtyard sculpture programme where she curated installations by Anselm Kiefer, Jeff Koons, Cornelia Parker and Thomas Houseago amongst others.  

Outside the Royal Academy she has contributed many essays to various publications and independently curated exhibitions, including, most recently, a retrospective survey on Arshile Gorky in Venice in 2019. She is a board member of the International Catalogue Raisonné Association and artistic advisor to MICAS.

Photo credit: Benedict Johnson