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Nigerian-born international art curator Okwui Enwezor has been named the new dean of academic affairs at the San Francisco Art Institute, campus officials announced.

Okwui Enwezor assumes the role of dean of the San Francisco Art Institute on July 1.

Enwezor will be the school's sixth dean in the institute's 143 year's of existence when he assumes his role on July 1. He replaced retiring dean Larry Thomas.

Founded in 1871, the Art Institute is regarded as one of the oldest, most prestigious schools of higher education in art and design in the United States.

"We're delighted to welcome Okwui Enwezor to lead the San Francisco Art Institute's academic programs," school President Chris Bratton said. "His impressive work as a curator, writer, and teacher and his international reach make him a good match for SFAI, which has a long-standing commitment to artistic innovation and cultural engagement. His vision of art as a catalyst for dialogue across cultures is a pedagogical vision well-suited to SFAIÕs extraordinary history of educating the best and most influential young artists."

What attracted Enwezor to SFAI is "the great intellectual openness at the school." He says, "I felt this sense of open inquiry among both the faculty and the students. It's not about producing artists who can enter the market quickly, but about helping artists shape ideas through the work of imagination and intellect. SFAI is an experimental environment, a good home for my own intellectual curiosity and sensibilities."

Enwezor, 41, was born in Kalaba, Nigeria and moved to New York City in 1981 to study political science at Jersey City State College in New Jersey. "At the time," he says, "curating was the farthest thing from my mind. I wanted to be a writer and a publisher. The expressive vehicle that allowed me to fulfill the first interest was poetry. And I was drawn to visual art, having discovered the lively New York art scene and museums shortly after I arrived."

After Enwezor left college in 1987, he traveled, wrote, gave readings, and organized exhibitions, until he launched a magazine called Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art in 1993.

"The main impetus for this journal was to develop a critical forum for sophisticated writing centered around African artists and those of the African diaspora whose works were largely invisible and absent from mainstream publications," he says. "I was interested in questions of inclusion and exclusion: Who has discursive power and how is it used to shape a worldview and articulate a response to art?"

Enwezor has been a writer, publisher, and curator. He is co-editor of "Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace," published in 1999 by MIT Press and the Institute for International Visual Arts, London. He also writes regularly for Frieze, the International Review of African American Art, Third Text, Index on Censorship, Glendora Review, Africa World Review, Flash Art, and aRude and is a consulting editor for Atlantica.

Enwezor's direction of two influential exhibitions in recent years' Documenta 11 in Kassel, Vienna, New Delhi, and St. Lucia, and The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945 - 1994, in MunichÑchallenges those who would say that art is only one thing and happens in only one place. In 1997 he provided the artistic direction for Africus, the 2nd Biennial of Johannesburg, Earlier exhibitions that he co-curated are Modern Life, at the Aljira Center for Contemporary Art in Newark, NJ; Six Contemporary African Artists, at the Zora Neale Hurston National Museum of Fine Art in Eatonville, Florida; In/Sight: African Photographers from 1940 to the Present, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City; and Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s - 1980s, at Queens Museum of Art, in New York City. He has also been an Adjunct Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago and a member of numerous juries and committees, including the International Advisory Committee of Carnegie International (1999) and the Jury for the Hugo Boss Prize at the Guggenheim Museum (1998).

"This appointment is especially exciting to us," says SFAI Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Chuck Collins, president and CEO of YMCA-San Francisco, "because of Enwezor's formidable experience and intellectual perspective. The Board believes his strength will be in advancing the entire framework of art education and its importance in advancing civil society. His appointment shows our deepening commitment to engage in the broader cultural dialogue of our time."

Enwezor will also serve as co-director of SFAI's new Center for Public Practice.