DONNA DE SALVO.

"Success is a job in New York," but London's even better. Despite a fulfilling three-and-a-half-year stint as a curator-at-large for Ohio's forward-thinking Wexner Center for the Arts, Donna De Salvo might have admitted, if pressed, that the Warholian maxim she lifted for her first freelance curatorial effort in 1989 (subtitled "The Early Art and Business of Andy Warhol") was more than a little on her mind. Known for her quirky, revisionist shows--most recently a posthumous retrospective of correspondence artist Ray Johnson (which opened at the Whitney in 1999, prompting speculation that De Salvo might land back in Manhattan as the museum's new curator of contemporary art)--De Salvo was hankering to return to a US art center, either Los Angeles or New York, where she'd begun her career after graduate school at Hunter College. That is, until the Tate called.

De Salvo's specialty, honed during a series of appointments at US museums, is American art of the postwar era, so her new portfolio--curator in the Department of Exhibitions and Display at Tate Modern--makes perfect sense, given the relative strengths of American art in the historical period covered by the new institution.

What she likes about Tate Modern is the possibility it affords to "create new models of curating within a historical context." Her novel take on the modern masters was fostered through her work with the Dia Art Foundation (1981-86), where she catalogued and administered large holdings of Warhol, De Maria, Chamberlain, Judd, and Twombly. (In fact, De Salvo is looking forward to working with the great Froelich collection of Warhol, Twombly, and Beuys, which is on long-term loan to the Tate.)

From 1990 to 1995 De Salvo commuted from Manhattan to Pittsburgh, where she served as an adjunct curator for the startup of the Andy Warhol Museum, and to Southampton, New York, where she did some edgy shows at the Parrish Art Museum. She then moved to the Wexner, in 1996, where she remained until her recent appointment at Tate Modern.

In July 1999 De Salvo first traveled to London for discussions with Lars Nittve and Iwona Blazwick, under whom she now works. Although she's already on the job at Tate Modern, her curatorial hand will not be reflected in the opening installation of the galleries. "My impact will be in the future planning of exhibitions and in later collection displays, which will change every six months." Her first show, "Century City," scheduled to open in January 2001, will bring together nine curators for nine cities, in a freewheeling way that juxtaposes different modalities of urbanism with the art and culture of discrete eras, including Tokyo in the '60s and '70s and London in the '90s. De Salvo is organizing the section on New York. "I'm interested in things like Yayoi Kusama doing an antiwar performance on Wall Street in 1968 and Gordon Matta-Clark opening a restaurant called Food in SoHo," she says. "The show will be a mix of art and milieu. I like to look at the intersections and find what has not yet been brought to the surface."