Beloved Curator Kathleen Goncharov Dies at 73
Her decorated 40-year career included serving as a US Commissioner for the 50th Venice Biennale.
Kathleen Goncharov, a longtime curator who served as the United States Commissioner for the 50th Venice Biennale, has died at the age of 73.
The news of her passing was announced by a group of friends and her partner, poet and artist Charles Doria. She died of natural causes in her Boca Raton home on New Year’s Eve. Goncharov is remembered as a doting friend, a champion of artists, and a gifted and intuitive curator.
“Kathy was an artist at heart, and this sensibility shaped everything she did,” artist and friend Robert Ransick wrote in an email to Hyperallergic. “It enabled her to recognize talent early and to intuit exactly how to support artists at pivotal moments in their careers.”
Born in Monroe, Michigan, in 1952, Goncharov remained in the state for her college education, graduating summa cum laude from Central Michigan University with a Bachelor’s in studio art. She later earned a Master’s degree from the University of Michigan in museum practice and art history.
Her decorated four-decade curatorial career began in 1980 at New York City’s influential Just Above Midtown (JAM), an art gallery founded by activist and filmmaker Linda Goode Bryant that highlighted Black artists. In 1987, Goncharov started her 13-year tenure as curator of the New School Art Collection. During this period, she commissioned Martin Puryear to create the Vera List Courtyard, an outdoor space used by the institution’s students that became the subject of a major lawsuit against the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).
Under Goncharov, the New School received a $45,000 grant for the Greenwich Village courtyard’s redesign in 1990 from the agency. As a condition of accepting the award, however, the NEA required the school to agree to anti-obscenity restrictions imposed by Congress. Following a lawsuit by plaintiffs, including the New School for Social Research, the NEA dropped the requirement. The case mirrors a recent victory for arts groups against the NEA’s compliance with Trump's ban on so-called “gender ideology.”
Goncharov later served as the Public Art curator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s List Visual Arts Center and as adjunct curator at Duke University’s Nasher Museum of Art.
In 2002, she was named United States Commissioner for the 50th Venice Biennale, for which she selected Bronx-born multi-media artist Fred Wilson to represent the US. Wilson’s pavilion, Speak of Me as I Am, explored the influence of people of African descent in Venice’s Renaissance.
“Kathy Goncharov was a rare type of curator, collaborator, and artist,” said Petah Coyne, a multi-media artist and friend of Goncharov, in an email to Hyperallergic. “She was smart, self-effacing, inquisitive, and lived for both contemporary and historic Italian art.”
From 2007 to 2011, Goncharov led the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions at Rutgers University, placing artist books in the collections of institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art. Before her retirement in 2025, Goncharov held the post of senior curator at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, where she organized over 30 exhibitions. Her last show was Glasstress Boca Raton 2025, a presentation of glass works produced in Murano by artists who had never before worked with the medium.
“The viewers that were fortunate enough to experience these shows could not help going away thinking about what they saw, thought, and were,” Coyne said. “Kathy's curatorialship will be greatly missed, as will her wonderful humor, love of good food, and travel with friends.”
She is survived by her longtime partner, Charles Doria; her siblings, Janet Sterling and Earl Shew; and their families.
“Her curatorial practice was marked by rare insight, resulting in exhibitions that challenged assumptions, sparked deep thinking, and revealed new relationships between artists and the contemporary moment,” Ransick said.
“She was also an incredible cook and artfully presided over countless meals with friends that were infused with good wine and her wry humor,” Ransick added. “She will be missed by many of us, but no one more than her longtime partner, Charlie Doria.”
