North Dakota Museum Of Art | Leadership

DIRECTOR

Laurel Reuter is the Founding Director of the North Dakota Museum of Art where she also serves as Chief Curator. She was born and raised on the Spirit Lake Dakota Reservation in North Dakota. She received an MA in American literature from the University of North Dakota in 1977, and as a graduate student—again in literature—established the University Art Galleries in the University Student Union that evolved into North Dakota’s first art museum, the North Dakota Museum of Art. She has curated dozens of exhibitions by regional, national and international artists and directed numerous artistic commissions (see the Exhibition section of this website). “CBS News Sunday Morning” produced two segments about Reuter in 1997. ARTNews profiled her in the November 1998 issue. In July 1998 Reuter was one of twenty people profiled by the Bismarck Tribune in their first edition of Notable North Dakotans. Reuter was honored with the 1999 Award of Distinction from the National Council of Art Administrators “in recognition of her dedication to art and to culture in North Dakota and her struggle to create a world-class museum in a remote environment. She helped a devastated community draw together and recover its spiritual existence (following the 1997 region-wide flood).” In 2007, she received the Apple Valley Curatorial Excellence Award ($10,000 for future curatorial work), an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from the University of North Dakota, and the North Dakota Governor’s Award for Individual Contribution to the Arts. In 2008 Reuter was awarded a $50,000 Curatorial Research Award from the Andy Warhol Foundation to study “what it means to be a Middle Eastern Woman in today’s world.” In 2008 she received $60,000 from Modern Media Foundation to work on the official biography of Chinese Artist Xu Bing. In 2013, she spent the month of January in Marfa, Texas, on a Lannan Literary Fellowship working on the Xu Bing book.

Reuter is the author, editor, and designer of many publications about art. Among her first publications was "Frontiers in Fiber: The Americans" which accompanied her exhibition by the same name and traveled to major cities throughout the Pacific Rim and China (1988-92). In 1997, she published "Whole Cloth" with co-author Mildred Constantine. "The Disappeared" came out in 2006 in conjunction with her exhibition which toured to five countries in Latin America and six cities in the States. Her most recent writing projects include "Into the Tussock: Contemporary Iceland Art" (2011) and a collaboration with printmaker Nancy Friese on a print portfolio, "Tumbling Time," with poems and essays by Reuter (2011) and "Snow Country Prison: Interned in North Dakota" (2013).