I have worked as a curator at academic art museums, contemporary art museums, and both independently and collaboratively. Below are some of those projects.
RETROaction (Part Two), Los Angeles, 2024
February 27 – May 5, 2024, Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles
Reviewed in: LA Downtown News
‘RETROaction’ (part 2) presents works from the early 1990s by Charles Gaines, Lorna Simpson and Gary Simmons, who all participated in the original ‘The Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism,’ as well as a new iteration of the exhibition, this time subtitled ‘Black Art and Reconstitution,’ presenting the work of ten artists who all embrace abstraction and materiality in their practice, selected by myself and Charles Gaines.
The exhibition was broken into three spaces: the first gallery featured historic works from the early 1990s by Gaines, Simpson and Simmons.
The second space, just off of this gallery, was a reading room – mirroring the inclusion of a reading room in Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism (1993). Here, the contents of the reading room are texts chosen by the participating artists in Retroaction (Part 2).
The third gallery – the largest – was devoted to Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Reconstitution. This space featured works by ten contemporary African American artists working in abstraction, selected by Charles and myself.
Read more on the project page here.
RETROaction, New York
November 15, 2023 – January 27, 2024, Hauser & Wirth 69th Street, New York
Reviewed in: The New York Times
On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the two landmark exhibitions—in a social and political context that bears many similarities—RETROaction celebrates the transformative impact these artists’ works had in the 90s and their active resonances now. Curated by Kate Fowle in collaboration with Homi K Bhabha, Charles Gaines, and Ellen Tani.
On the third floor, works by New York-based artists Kevin Beasley, Torkwase Dyson, Leslie Hewitt and Rashid Johnson comprise an updated iteration of Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism, which in its original 1993 incarnation juxtaposed the contributions of eleven contemporary Black artists with published texts that critically discussed their work. Curated by Gaines and Ellen Tani, this current revisitation of the original show is entitled Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Reconstitution, and explores the discursive relationship between black abstraction and the decolonial project.
Featuring artists who are committed to both abstraction and materiality, the presentation also includes critical texts and raises important questions about the premise of the original exhibition while “rethinking structures of artistic knowledge and the critical discourse that surrounds it,” as Gaines describes. When ‘RETROaction’ travels to Hauser & Wirth Downtown Los Angeles in 2024, this section of the exhibition will feature works by the New York participants as well as Los Angeles-based artists.
Area Code Art Fair
August 1-31, 2020, Greater Boston area
Co-organized the first contemporary art fair for the New England region, spearheading the Special Projects section, installed in collaboration with SpaceUs. Informed by values of collective intelligence, transparent experimentation, and open access, AREA CODE was developed in collaboration with a team of Boston-area curators. Conceived as an effort to face the economic challenges that the pandemic has posed to the arts community, AREA CODE committed to building a sustainable and equitable platform to support visual artists, and to highlighting the cultural production of the region through a progressive profit-sharing initiative. Through online and decentralized in-person experiences across Boston, the fair featured works from New England’s most inspiring art galleries, nonprofit organizations, and individual artists (including current and recent MFA candidates) without gallery representation. Along with the fair’s main section, other curated sections focused on online artist talks and performance art, drive-in or drive-by outdoor presentations of digital/video art, and storefront displays.
Tschabalala Self: Out of Body
January 20 – September 7, 2020, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston
Tschabalala Self (b. 1990, Harlem, New York) creates large-scale figurative paintings that integrate hand-printed and found textiles, drawing, printmaking, sewing, and collage techniques to tell stories of urban life, the body, and humanity. The artist’s first Boston presentation—and her largest exhibition to date—will include a selection of paintings and sculptures that represent personal avatars, couplings, and everyday social exchanges inspired by urban life. Together, they articulate new expressions of embodiment and humanity through the exaggerated forms and exuberant textures of the human figure, pointing to its limitless capacity to represent imagined states, memories, aspirations, and emotions. Yet Self’s characters possess an ordinary grace grounded in reality: they are reflections of the artist or people she can imagine meeting in Harlem, her hometown.
Beyond Infinity: Contemporary Art After Kusama
September 24, 2019 – February 7, 2021, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston
Drawn primarily from the ICA’s permanent collection, this exhibition presents artworks that engage with the pioneering ideas of Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929, Matsumoto, Japan). Beyond Infinity: Contemporary Art after Kusama celebrates Kusama’s prescient artistic vision, which since the 1950s has merged techniques of repetition, obsessional patterns, and the activation of the body in search of a path to liberation from psychological and societal constraints. Through her paintings, sculptures, and environments, as well as body art, film, and performance, Kusama channeled the attitudes and realities of the moment but avoided such labels as pop, minimalism, postminimalism, and performance art. Kusama’s peers shared her interest in timeless concepts that pushed the limits of possibility and of imagination: the idea of the infinite; the experience of rapture; the representational power of illusion; and the threshold between life and death. Here, Kusama’s work is presented alongside that of her contemporaries, such as Louise Bourgeois and Ana Mendieta, and other artists whose work builds on her lasting impact on contemporary art through dizzying arrays of forms and colors, infinite reflection, and the evocative vocabulary of the body.
When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art
October 23, 2019 – January 26, 2020, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston
February 23–August 23, 2020, Minneapolis Institute of Art
February 5, 2021 – May 30, 2021, Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University
When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art considers how contemporary artists are responding to the migration, immigration, and displacement of peoples today. We are currently witnessing the highest levels of movement on record—the United Nations estimates that one out of every seven people in the world is an international or internal migrant who moves by choice or by force, with great success or great struggle. The exhibition borrows its title from a poem by Warsan Shire, a Somali-British poet who gives voice to the experiences of refugees. Through artworks made since 2000 by twenty artists from more than a dozen countries — such as Colombia, Cuba, France, India, Iraq, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, Palestine, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States — this exhibition highlights diverse artistic responses to migration ranging from personal accounts to poetic meditations, and features a range of mediums, including sculpture, installation, painting, and video. Artists in the exhibition include Kader Attia, Tania Bruguera, Isaac Julien, Hayv Kahraman, Reena Saini Kallat, Richard Mosse, Carlos Motta, Yinka Shonibare, Xaviera Simmons, and Do-Ho Suh, among others. A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition, with an essay by Eva Respini and Ruth Erickson and texts by prominent scholars Aruna D’Souza, Okwui Enwezor, Thomas Keenan, Peggy Levitt, and Uday Singh Mehta, among others.
The exhibition was accompanied by a fully-illustrated catalog, for which I was a contributor and the publication coordinator: When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art, ed. Ruth Erickson and Eva Respini. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.
Art Wall: Nina Chanel Abney
This is a unique, site-specific commission from Nina Chanel Abney (b. 1982, Chicago) for the ICA/Boston’s Art Wall, on view Jan 17, 2019 – Jan 3, 2021. Deeply invested in creating imagery that is legible and accessible, Abney is known for weaving colorful geometric shapes, cartoons, language, and symbols into chaotic and energetic compositions. At the ICA, she has created a mural that speaks to social tensions in the digital age, including the constant stream of true and false information, the dilemma of liberal racism, and abuses of power that lead to structural inequality.
Second Sight: The Paradox of Vision in Contemporary Art
March 1 – June 3, 2018, Bowdoin College Museum of Art
Commissioned work:
Postcards to Sophie Calle, 1991. Edition of 100. By Joseph Grigely, designed by Emma Cole. The Postcards to Sophie Calle were written in the spring of 1991, in response to Sophie Calle’s exhibition, Les Aveugles, at Luhring Augustine Gallery in New York. A selection of 16 were published in English and German in the Swiss art quarterly Parkett (No. 36, 1993, p. 88–101). All of the postcards are published here, accompanied by a new preface by the author written on the occasion of the exhibition. Joseph Grigely (b. 1956) is a Chicago-based artist and writer. His exhibitions include two Whitney Biennials (2000 and 2014) and solo shows at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin; the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Grigely’s books include Conversation Pieces (1998), Blueberry Surprise (2006), Exhibition Prosthetics (2010), and Oceans of Love: The Uncontainable Gregory Battcock (2015). He has also published essays on disability theory and bodily criticism.
Two site-specific wall drawings: 1459 – Stand Out from the Crowd. and Rubber, by Chicago-based Tony Lewis (b. 1986), made in collaboration with 15 Bowdoin students over the course of 5 days. Stand out from the crowd belongs to a body of work that situates truisms from H. Jackson Brown’s best-selling popular text, Life’s Little Instruction Book, directly onto surfaces of public display by way of drywall screws, rubber bands, and graphite powder. Rubber depicts the character for “rubber” in the stenographic writing system of Gregg shorthand, which as a means of phonetic translation, combines speech with abstract graphic mark.
Programs:
- Curator’s talk and opening tour.
- Gallery talk with participating artist Nyeema Morgan, whose drawing Like It Is: Those Extraordinary Twins (2016) is included in the exhibition.
- Testimony. Performative workshop with participating artist Shaun Leonardo, whose drawings Champ: Sonny Liston 1 and Champ: Sonny Liston 2 are included in the exhibition. Testimony featured student narratives of migration and displacement, both spoken and embodied, in a powerful public forum.
- Film screening of Notes on Blindness (2016), a feature-length documentary based on the award-winning short film of the same name that profiles the writer and theologian John M. Hull (1935-2015). Hull reflected regularly on his gradually deteriorating vision on audio diaries, whose transcripts were published as a memoir in 1990 called Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness. In the hands of filmmakers James Spinney and Peter Middleton, Hull’s voice grounds a lush soundscape in a film whose aesthetic opens onto new ways of understanding the self, the imagination, memory, and human relationships. As of spring 2018, the film is available on Netflix and I highly recommend it.
- Gallery talk with Elizabeth Muther, Professor of English, Bowdoin College
Nonvisual exploration and Open Access workshop with Vancouver-based participating artist Carmen Papalia (b.1981). Papalia, who is blind and identifies as a nonvisual learner, conceived the installation When We Make Things Openly Accessible We Create a Force Field for the exhibition. He will lead an eyes-closed investigation of public space followed by a workshop during which participants will discuss how to activate the tenets of his Open Access platform in the context of the Bowdoin community.
Accessibility: audible description listening devices, produced in collaboration with the Information Technology and Academic Computing Department at Bowdoin College.
Playlist
Compiled by student Miles Brautigam in conjunction with, and inspired by, Second Sight: The Paradox of Vision in Contemporary Art. Songs include nods to artworks and artists represented in the exhibition, as well as references to eyes, sight, blindness, invisibility, sense and nonsense. This playlist aims to show that which can’t be seen: the ineffable quality of music that inspires and moves us.
Reading list:
John Hull, Touching the Rock
Derek Jarman, Chroma
Three New York Dadas and the Blindman, Marcel Duchamp, Henri-Pierre Roché, Beatrice Wood
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Oliver Sacks, The Mind’s Eye
Selected Press:
Second Sight: The Paradox of Vision in Contemporary Art, John Tyson for CAA Reviews, October 17, 2018
Art review: ‘Second Sight’ brings fresh, provocative visions to Bowdoin art museum, Daniel Kany for the Portland Press Herald, March 25, 2018
Looking at Ourselves Through the Eyes of Others: Second Sight + privilege at Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Vivian Ewing for The Chart, Vol. 3, No. 2: Spring 2018
‘Second Sight’ explores vision and accessibility, Isabelle Hallé for The Bowdoin Orient, March 2, 2018
“Walking with Eyes Closed on the Quad,” Rebecca Goldfine, May 10, 2018 – coverage of Carmen Papalia’s second visit to campus for his Open Access workshop and nonvisual program
“Carmen Papalia addresses accessibility through art and activism,” Isabelle Hallé for The Bowdoin Orient, October 27, 2017 – discusses Carmen Papalia’s first visit to campus
Finding Discomfort in the Art Museum, Ellen Tani and Benjamin Wu reflect on art and disability for BCMA e-newsletter, May 1, 2018
Site-Specific Drawings in New Museum Show Stretch Language, Rebecca Goldfine, April 12, 2018 – discusses drawings by Tony Lewis
Constructing Drawings with Chicago-based artist Tony Lewis, Maria McCarthy for BCMA e-newsletter, March 27, 2018
Graphite and collaboration: drawing on the walls with Tony Lewis, Isabelle Hallé for The Bowdoin Orient, February 23, 2018
The Sound of Art: Art Museum’s ‘Second Sight’ Exhibit Goes Beyond the Visual, Tom Porter, March 26, 2018 – discusses the exhibition’s innovative devices for audio description
Press Release, “Second Sight: The Paradox of Vision in Contemporary Art” to open in early March at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art – Fall 2017
Art & Resolution, 1900 to Today
Nov 15, 2016-April 16, 2017, Bowdoin College Museum of Art
The dual meaning of “resolution,” as both coming-into-view and overcoming conflict, defines a wide range of artistic responses to the global shifts in society and culture—world wars, disasters, financial collapse, environmental degradation, and violations of human rights. Featuring, among others, the work of Adi Nes, Chris Ofili, Dorothea Lange, Robert Rauschenberg, Kara Walker, Shirin Neshat and Sally Mann, this exhibition surveys how artists of the twentieth century mobilized artistic expression to clarify challenges, signal support to those struggling with difficult circumstances, and validate the importance of choice and freedom. Early twentieth-century photography conveys how individuals make a home amidst domestic and international migration, while a variety of aesthetic responses in the aftermath of World War II testify to the horrifying prospect of nuclear annihilation with strategies ranging from radical abstraction to turbulent figuration. Other works explore how art can bridge creativity and citizenship in an increasingly complicated matrix of identity formation and political conflict. Artworks may seek resolution through what they represent, but they may also refuse to resolve themselves in our field of vision, reminding us that resolution does not always come readily and that it is as much a process as an outcome. Included is a section of Sosaku-hanga—creative prints (創作版画). These prints emerged as an artistic form of expression in twentieth-century Japan. This installation was co-curated for “Art & Resolution, 1900 to Today” by students from Art History 3180: “Japanese Print Culture,” fall 2016.