Jenelle Porter, photo: Aaron Igler

By Mackie Healy, Art Market Views Contributor

Beantown’s contemporary art clout expands with two new appointments at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art.

Jenelle Porter has been named senior curator. She was previously a curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania. Pedro Alonzo, a Boston based independent curator, has been named adjunct curator.

They join a team led by Helen Molesworth, former head of modern and contemporary art at the Harvard Art Museum, appointed chief curator at ICA Boston earlier this year.

Porter has been at the ICA UPenn since 2005. There she  helped to organize a number of notable exhibitions, including Trisha Donnelly’s first museum show in 2008, Dirt on Delight: Impulses that Form Clay in 2009, and Mineral Spirits: Anne Chu and Matthew Monahan mounted earlier this year. At the ICA, she will develop exhibitions, programming and grow the museum’s permanent collection.

Prior to ICA, Porter served at various curatorial positions at Artists Space in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Whitney. Porter received her Masters in Critical and Curatorial Studies from UCLA in 2004. She starts work at the ICA Boston in January 2011.

Alonzo is an independent curator who organized the ICA’s recent Dr. Lackra and Shepard Fairey: Supply and Demand. He will be working on a upcoming show of devoted to the artist Swoon, slated for Aug. 31, 2010