IWONA BLAZWICK.

In the late '70s Iwona Blazwick, who was trained as an artist, had an epiphany: "I found myself overwhelmed by what I was looking at." She gave up her career making art and decided instead to attend full time to the work of others. With an academic background in art history, aesthetics, and English literature, she's since divided her time between writing, teaching, curating, and editing.

When Blazwick joined the Tate in 1997 (she was named head of exhibitions and displays in 1998), she entered the museum world after four years at Phaidon Press, where she established a new division for contemporary art-book publishing. Given her focus on contemporary practices, is she intimidated by the mandate of installing a collection that reaches back an entire century? Actually, this challenge seems to excite her most: "Indeed, one of the most pressing concerns was to find a way out of presenting the collection according to the strictly linear organization that ignores wider contextual influences."

As head of exhibitions, it will fall to Blazwick to oversee the entire art program and, together with director Lars Nittve, to work closely with other curators. It's by no means the first time she has been involved in the grind of putting shows together. From 1987 to 1993, Blazwick was director of exhibitions at the London ICA, where, among other installations, she exhibited Gerhard Richter's "October" series alongside Peter Halley's cellular paintings. She also produced shows dealing with Situationism and the Independent Group, as well as exhibitions of a number of women artists who emerged in the '80s, including Katharina Fritsch, Jenny Hoizer, Barbara Kruger, and Rosemarie Trockel. During her editorial stint at Phaidon, she remained active as a curator, participating in such large-scale projects as the 1993 "On Taking a Normal Situation" exhibition in Antwerp and "Work in Progress," one section of the 1996 extravaganza "NowHere" at the Louisiana Museum outside Copenhagen. The research for the latter was conducted on two fronts: "On the one hand I studied historically important people like Susan Hiller, Mary Kelly, Hanne Darboven, and Eva Hesse; on the other hand I had the opportunity to travel around Scandinavia, where I encountered some incredible, energetic young work."

Blazwick's interest in the link between past and present should serve her well, and one gets the sense from speaking to her that all art worth presenting can be made relevant to the contemporary condition. "We go from the birth of the European avant-garde to the future, so the opportunities to create new connections are tremendous. One can see the museum as a large TV station with lots of different channels going out." In addition to the shows installed in the new Bankside plant, Blazwick plans to continue working on projects that reach beyond the institution per Se, such as Mark Dion's Tate Thames Dig, a collective archaeological dig performed on the banks of the river last summer.