Assistant Curator, Architecture and Urban Studies
Curator, BMW Guggenheim Lab

Guggenheim curator since 2008

David van der Leer joined the Guggenheim in October 2008, and first worked on the exhibitions Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward and Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum. In May 2011, his Intervals exhibition with the San Francisco-based collective Futurefarmers opened to the public at the museum and around New York City. Together with Maria Nicanor, Van der Leer heads the curatorial team of the BMW Guggenheim Lab. The Lab addresses issues of contemporary urban life through programs and public discourse. The first BMW Guggenheim Lab was open in New York from August 3 to October 16, 2011, and will continue its travels with visits to Berlin and Mumbai in 2012. In addition, Van der Leer is curating stillspotting nyc, a two-year multidisciplinary project that takes the Guggenheim Museum’s Architecture and Urban Studies programming out into the streets of the New York City's five boroughs, hoping to find special moments of stillness and repose. Every three to five months, “stillspots” are identified, created, or transformed by architects, artists, designers, composers, and philosophers into public tours, events, or installations. The first stillspotting nyc edition, Sanatorium by artist Pedro Reyes, was launched in June 2011 in Brooklyn, and a second edition was installed as a collaboration between Arvo Pärt and Snøhetta in Lower Manhattan in September 2011. In 2012 editions will be hosted with SO-IL in Queens, and Justin Benett and Matthea Harvey in Staten Island, among others.

As curatorial strategist, Van der Leer is part of the three-person curatorial team for the American Pavilion of the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2012, and for the Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture of 2011, he was curator of the exhibition And Then It Became a City: Six Cities Under 60. Van der Leer has lectured internationally on architecture and cities and is a regular contributor to publications such as Domus, Mark, The Architect's Newspaper, Azure, and PIN-UP. Prior to the Guggenheim, Van der Leer held editorial and curatorial positions at 010 Publishers in Rotterdam; the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), in Rotterdam; and Steven Holl Architects in New York. He received his master's with a focus on urban and architectural theory from the Department of Art and Cultural Sciences at Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands.