Cathleen Chaffee moved to the Buffalo area in early 2014 to begin work at the Albright-Knox. Previously, she held curatorial positions at the Yale University Art Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. In 2015, at the Albright-Knox, Chaffee curated Overtime: The Art of Work, which looked at the representation of workers and working conditions in Modern and Contemporary Art; the first American museum exhibition of David Adamo's sculpture; and co-curated Screen Play: Life in an Animated World, which considered more than 40 contemporary artists from 20 nations who use animation as a tool in their practice. Also in 2015, Chaffee organized Eija-Liisa Ahtila: Ecologies of Drama, a survey of works by the pioneering Finnish video artist, and co-curated Looking at Tomorrow: Light and Language from the Panza Collection, 1967-1990, an exhibition debuting many works from the museum's important 2015 acquisition of Minimal and Conceptual Art. In 2016, the AK opened a show Chaffee co-curated of Erin Shirreff's photographs, sculptures, and videos, that is the artist's first large-scale American museum show. Chafee writes on contemporary art for publications including Artforum, Frieze, and Bomb and has recently published essays on Richard Artschwager, Sven Augustijnen, Carol Bove, Marcel Broodthaers, and Joëlle Tuerlinckx. Chaffee is particularly interested in installation art practices, time-based media, and issues of obsolescence.
