Call for Entries: Orange County Center for Contemporary Art (OCCCA) invites submissions in all media from artists who will share their stories and expressions of self-awareness. Issues related to gender, race, religion, sexuality, politics, science, technology & psychology are just some of the personal themes explored in Compass.

Curator Amy Grimm
Independent Curator and Assistant Professor of Art History & Museum Studies: Irvine Valley College

The OCCCA guest curator for Compass, Amy V. Grimm has degrees in both Art History and Psychology and has lectured extensively on contemporary art and issues of identity. Combining her research interests with compassion and humor, Grimm combines her academic training to address complex and often challenging issues in identity.

Amy V. Grimm is an Independent Curator and Assistant Professor of Art History & Museum Studies at Irvine Valley College. Grimm received her B.A. in Psychology from the State University of New York in New Paltz, New York. She received a Graduate Certificate in Museum Management and a M.A. in Art History from the University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina. Grimm’s M.A. Thesis, is titled, Andy Warhol: An Inquiry into Self Identity and Portraiture. Ms. Grimm’s area of specialization includes Modern and Contemporary European and American Art. Grimm’s museum and academic career spans over fifteen years including work for the Albany Institute of History & Art, the South Carolina State Museum, the El Paso Museum of Art, and the Long Beach Museum of Art.

As a museum curator, Grimm has developed and supervised over 40 exhibitions including independent projects and museum collaborations. Notable exhibitions include, Out of Eden: The Sculptural Work of Harry Geffert for the El Paso Museum of Art, and Sweet Subversives: Contemporary California Drawings for the Long Beach Museum of Art. Grimm’s scholarship related to exhibition programming and independent critical reviews have been published as museum catalogs and articles in national publications such as Sculptureand Artlies magazines.

Grimm is past president of the Border Museum Association in El Paso, Texas; an organization that sponsors events to promote international arts partnerships. Working for the College Art Association, Grimm has developed annual conference programming in cities such as Seattle, Atlanta, Boston and New York. For the College Art Association’s Annual Conference in 2007, in New York City, Grimm chaired the panel Out of the Frame: Creativity and Change. This panel addressed curatorial risk taking in light of controversial topics and technological challenges. Also during the 2007 conference, Grimm curated The Media Lounge, a unique space dedicated to showing contemporary new media, such as the MIT Media Lab, Potter-Belmar Labs and several independent filmmakers and videographers.

Grimm continues to lecture extensively on topics such as Andy Warhol, Contemporary Art and Museum Studies. As an Assistant Professor of Art History & Museum Studies, Grimm is developing a new undergraduate program in Applied Museum Studies for Irvine Valley College. Students participating in the program will gain the knowledge and skills necessary for a variety of employment opportunities, in museums and other arts organizations.

“Psychology of Self", representation of one’s identity or a subject of experience and from the opening paragraph of Andre Breton’s: Manifesto of Surrealism 1924:

“So strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in life – real life, I mean – that in the end this belief is lost. Man, that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his destiny, has trouble assessing the objects he has been led to use, objects that his nonchalance has brought his way, or that he has earned through his own efforts, almost always through his own efforts for he has agreed to work, at least he has not refused to try his luck (or what he calls his luck!).At this point he feels extremely modest: he knows what women he has had, what silly affairs he has been involved in; he is unimpressed by his wealth or his poverty, in this respect he is still a newborn babe and, as for the approval of his conscience, I confess that he does very nicely without it. If he still retains a certain lucidity, all he can do is turn back toward his childhood which, however his guides and mentors may have botched it, still strikes him as somehow charming. There, the absence of any known restrictions allows him the perspective of several lives lived at once; this illusion becomes firmly rooted within him; now he is only interested in the fleeting, the extreme facility of everything. Children set off each day without a worry in the world. Everything is near at hand, the worst material conditions are fine. The woods are white or black, one will never sleep.”