Robin Clark holds a doctorate in art history from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. But she seems almost destined to have become a curator rather than a full-time academic.

JOHN R. McCUTCHEN / Union-Tribune Nancy Rubin's sculpture, “Pleasure Point,” at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, hovers above Robin Clark, a curator at the institution.

“I knew I never wanted to be far away from the actual works of art,” she explained recently.

Her dad was a jeweler; artists and artists studios were part of Clark's family life. Petersborough, N.H., where she grew up, is home to one of the most famous – and the oldest – artists' retreats, the MacDowell Colony. A summer job there reinforced the idea that she enjoyed being around artists.

It follows that being a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego fits Clark well, because it is the kind of showcase where working closely with exhibiting artists is frequently a major part of an exhibition.

She was appointed a year ago, arriving at the museum in January. But in the past year, Clark has been shuttling back and forth to Missouri, completing projects for the St. Louis Museum of Art, where she served as an associate curator from 2002 through 2007, and for the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts (also in St. Louis), where she was a guest curator for “The Light Project,” recently completed.

"When I was in St. Louis, I realized I missed being near the ocean. I grew up near one andit just isn't the same being near the Mississippi, with banks covered in concrete." – ROBIN CLARK, curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego

Art transforms architecture in a Pulitzer-sponsored work she oversaw: Rainier Kehres and Sebastian Hungerer's striking “Chorus,” for which the German artists suspended a bold array of lights to evoke the contour of a missing roof – destroyed in a fire – of an aged church.

Now she's completed the last of her St. Louis commitments. And in one of two major projects on tap, she's going to take up this same intersection of art and architecture in a larger way with a multi-artist show she's assembling next fall for the MCASD at its La Jolla address. The exhibition, which opens in September, is “Automatic Cities: The Architectural Imaginary in Contemporary Art.” Eleven artists and one artists' collective will be represented, nearly all by new work.

Then, earlier this month, the Getty Trust announced a major grants project involving museums from Santa Barbara to San Diego, “Art in Los Angeles: 1945-1980,” and Clark will oversee the MCASD's exhibition and accompanying book, “Phenomenal: California Light and Space.” The show, also scheduled for next year, will represent some of the most important West Coast artists of the last half century: Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Doug Wheeler and Maria Nordman, among others.

“We'll be looking at what it (the light and space school) means as a historical movement and there will be different generations of scholars in the catalog, which will be a more ambitious work than even the show, because it will be broader in scope. We're hoping it will be an engaging, useful and lasting book, since there aren't many broad references on it.”

Clark smiles broadly when she talks about both of these major undertakings. And it's not hard to see why. These projects underscore her motivation for moving from a general art museum to one specializing in art of the '60s to the present.

“Everything is different here,” she said. “The St. Louis Museum of Art was a large institution, with 10 curators. One thing I loved about St. Louis was having colleagues in different specialties like Egyptian and Renaissance art. You could turn to them for expertise in other areas.

“Here (at the MCASD), everything is more nimble. You have three buildings and three curators. And contemporary art is the core focus. It's a good change for me.”

She's also happy to be on one of the coasts again.

“When I was in St. Louis, I realized I missed being near the ocean. I grew up near one and it just isn't the samebeing near the Mississippi, with banks covered in concrete.”

Clark is living in La Jolla, not far from the museum and within walking distance of the beach.

She didn't know she wanted to focus on contemporary art while earning her degree in art history at Smith College. (She finished in 1987.) After completing an M.A. in art history at Boston University in 1990, she was hired for a year-long internship at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, focusing on its broad photography collection.

One of her projects at the Getty was to help assemble “Looking at Photographs: A Guide to Technical Terms,” a book that offered valuable experience in all aspects of putting together an art publication. But a stint as a research assistant at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles proved more pivotal: She assisted chief curator Paul Schimmel on a major exhibition of photographic works by the leading German artist Sigmar Polke.

“I realized then that I was interested in contemporary art rather than wanting to be focused strictly on photography,” Clark said. “I wanted to look at a broad range of contemporary art practices in my work.”

That project helped her decide to pursue a doctorate, while still keeping her hand in the museum world. She worked at Guggenheim Museum in New York from 1996 to 1999, doing curatorial research for much publicized acquisitions from Dr. Giuseppe Panza, one of the pre-eminent collectors of American art since 1960. Then, while still in New York, Clark served as an assistant curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, helping to assemble two high-profile exhibitions: “Eva Hesse” and “Diane Arbus: Revelations.”

Now, with a Getty-funded project in front of her in San Diego, she views work on the Panza holdings at the Guggenheim as a case of serendipity; he was one of early and most passionate collectors of work by the Light and Space artists such as Irwin and Turrell, believing they are among the major artists of the 20th century.

“This just seems an amazing coincidence and brings me full circle,” Clark said.

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