Charlotta Kotik, a native of Prague, first came to the United States in 1970. That same year she began working at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, where she remained until 1983.
That year she moved to Brooklyn, New York, to assume a position in the Prints and Drawing Department of the Brooklyn Museum of Art. When the Department of Contemporary Art was established in 1985, she became its chairman. At the Brooklyn Museum, where she worked until 2007, she established one of her major contributions to the practice of curating— the Grand Lobby Projects—in order to provide exhibition opportunities for extensive installation works by artists such as Martin Puryear, Joseph Kosuth, Alison Saar, Ida Applebroog, Petah Coyne and many others. In the 1980s she also initiated Working in Brooklyn, a series of group exhibitions documenting the energy of the nascent Brooklyn art scene. Amy Sillman, James Siena and Fred Tomaselli got their early exposure there.
In 1993, as the United States commissioner for Venice Biennale, she presented works by Louise Bourgeois in an exhibition that later traveled internationally. During the course of her career, Ms. Kotik has organized over 100 museum exhibitions, presenting the work od contemporary artists such as Mariko Mori, Kerry James Marshall, John Cage, Jenny Holzer, Glen Ligon and Robert Longo. Ms. Kotik coordinated a traveling exhibition of Annie Leibovitz photography, curated an extensive exhibition with more than two hundred Brooklyn-based artists, Open House: Working in Brooklyn, and Graffiti—the first museum exhibition of graffiti art.
Recently, Kotik curated a retrospective of Elizabeth Enders’ Landscape/Language /Line for Lyman Allyn Art Museum in Connecticut; Marking Space, a collaborative drawing, performance and sound project for Kentler International Drawing Space, Brooklyn, NY; The Expanding Mall, cont’d: Jennifer Protas and Karni Dorell for the Gallery Skolska 28, in Prague; 11th National Drawing Invitational: New York, Singular Drawings, for Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, Arkansas ; Will to Create Will to Live: The Culture of Terezin, for 92nd Street Y in NYC and Peter Sis: Cartography of the Mind for Czech Center, NYC.
She contributed essays “Post-totalitarian Art in Eastern and Central Europe” for the Global Feminism exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum and “The Strange and the Beautiful in the work of Aideen Barry” for the catalogue Changing Tracks, EU Public Art Program installed in Catalonia, Ireland and Great Britain in June 2014. Her article “Shooting Film” was published in Guernica, in April 2014.
In 2013 she participated in a symposium Between the Signs at Fotograf Festival in Prague with a contribution “Photography, Gender and the Use of Text” and was Critic-in-Residence at Art OMI International Artist Residency in Ghent ,NY.
Kotik teaches at the School of Visual Arts, NYC, and the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. She is a member of a numerous national and international art organizations and is a co-chair of the Jindrich Chalupecky Award, an important recognition of young visual artists in Czech Republic. This project became a model for the acknowledgement of the artistic excellence in 10 other Post-Totalitarian countries. Presently, Charlotta Kotik works as a writer and independent curator and facilitates various projects for galleries, alternative spaces and museums alike.