Eric Golo Stone appointed new artistic director at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart

Eric Golo Stone has been appointed as the new artistic director of the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart. He will begin working in the position January 1, 2020. Stone will succeed Fatima Hellberg, whose tenure as artistic director concludes in December, 2019.

Stone’s writing and exhibitions emphasize legal mechanisms and socioeconomic conditions that constitute the production, distribution, and reception of art. From 2013 to 2017 he was a curator at LAXART, Los Angeles. In 2018, he organized the exhibition and program, Contractual Situations We Live By, at the Kunsthalle Bern. In addition to currently working on multiple book projects, he is organizing, US Code: Title 26, a forthcoming research initiative and exhibition at Artists Space, New York, which considers the consequential relationship between the art field, tax law, and systemic inequality in the United States. His essays have been published in Afterall, October, Texte zur Kunst, and Flash Art, among other publications. He is a recipient of the 2018 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for the book, Artist Contracts in the Political Economy, which examines how artists utilize contracts to intervene in the legal framings, transactional structures, property relations, debt obligations, and labor conditions that artistic production operates within.

Stone said in a statement, “The Künstlerhaus Stuttgart is a more than 40-year ongoing process of experimental institution-making. It has consistently been a space where ideas of institutional governance are questioned, enacted, and embodied as artistic interests. The artistic directorship at the Künstlerhaus has always been structured as a multi-year project, and those who have been elected to the position of artistic director often draw from their art practice backgrounds or maintain artistic criteria at the core of their work. It is this particular institutional identity that I believe makes the Künstlerhaus uniquely qualified to respond to the current structural problems that are so evident in the artworld. […] I look forward to building on the history of the Künstlerhaus as an institution where the organizing of policies can be realized as deliberate and substantive, restless and unruly, artistic experimentation.”