INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL exhibitions

Living as Form (The Nomadic Version)

Suzanne Lacy, The Roof is on Fire, 1993-94. Courtesy the artist.
The Complaints Choir, Chicago. Courtesy Clare Britt, 2007.
Women on Waves. Ecuador, June 2008. Courtesy Women on Waves.
Suzanne Lacy, The Roof is on Fire, 1993-94. Courtesy the artist.
Elin Wikström. What would happen if everybody did this?, 1993. Courtesy the artist.

Co-organized with Creative Time, Living as Form (The Nomadic Version) is an unprecedented, international project exploring over twenty years of cultural works that blur the forms of art and everyday life, emphasizing participation, dialogue, and community engagement.

In collaboration with twenty-five curators from around the world, Nato Thompson has selected 50 projects as the foundation of this exhibition, which will expand as it travels. New additions will be selected by each host institution, increasing the diversity of works made in the last twenty years that are represented in the show. Circulating via a hard drive, on which the new projects will be uploaded, Living as Form (The Nomadic Version) will provide a broad look at a vast array of socially engaged practices that appear with increasing regularity in fields ranging from theater to activism, and urban planning to visual art.

In addition to expanding the content of the exhibition, each host institution will organize site-specific, socially engaged, commissioned projects or events that connect to the theme and “activate” the show. As the essence of the works is rooted in social engagement, the host is also expected to provide participatory experiences that possess some sort of political content for the visitors to experience. At the end of each presentation, the new material will be accumulated on an online archive that documents over 350 socially engaged projects.

Living as Form (The Nomadic Version) is the flexible, expanding iteration of Living as Form, a site-specific project presented by Creative Time in the historic Essex Market in New York from September 24–October 16, 2011. More information about the original iteration of the exhibition can be found on Creative Time’s website here.

Exhibition Updates

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Curator

Nato Thompson

Nato Thompson is Chief Curator at Creative Time, New York, as well as a writer and activist. Among his public projects for Creative Time are Tania Bruguera’s Immigrant Movement International, Democracy in America: The National Campaign, and Waiting for Godot, a project by Paul Chan held in New Orleans. Thompson was formerly a curator at MASS MoCA, and he also curated ICI’s Experimental Geography, which traveled to eight venues in North America.

Touring Schedule

  • Richard E. Peeler Art Center
    DePauw University, Greencastle, Indiana
    September 5, 2013 - November 28, 2013
  • ARTifariti
    Tifariti, Western Sahara
    October 15, 2012 - October 30, 2012
  • University Art Gallery, University of California, San Diego
    San Diego, California
    October 4, 2012 - December 14, 2012
  • McDonough Museum of Art
    Youngstown, Ohio
    September 7, 2012 - November 9, 2012
  • Kadist Art Foundation
    San Francisco, California
    March 10, 2012 - May 12, 2012

Booking Info

Number of artists or artist groups: approx. 50
Number of works: approx. 50
Space required: extremely flexible
Available dates: January 2012 through December 2014
For additional information, contact Frances Wu Giarratano, Exhibitions Manager, at 212.254.8200 x 129, or .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Accompanying this exhibition is the Living As Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011 catalogue. Please visit MIT Press for more information.

Independent Curators International - Performance Now: The First Decade of the New Century
INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL exhibitions

Performance Now: The First Decade of the New Century

Mike Kelley, Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction #32, Plus, 2009. Photo by Paula Court, courtesy of Performa.
William Kentridge, I Am Not Me, the Horse is Not Mine, 2009. Photo by Paula Court, courtesy of Performa.
Laurie Simmons, The Music of Regret, 2005. Film still. Act 3. Commissioned by Salon 94 and co-produced by Performa.
Christian Jankowski, Rooftop Routine, 2007. Photo courtesy of Performa.
Emily Coates, Pat Catterson, Sally Silvers, and Patricia Hoffbauer in Yvonne Rainer’s RoS Indexical, 2007. Photo copyright Paula Court, courtesy of Performa.

In her groundbreaking book Performance Art: From Futurism To The Present (1979), art historian and curator RoseLee Goldberg showed that performance is central to the history of 20th century art. In 2005, she launched Performa 05, the first biennial of visual art performance, and predicted that performance would become “the medium of the 21st century.” Indeed, its time has come.

Museums around the world are establishing performance art departments, including most recently the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and several museums currently being built will have dedicated performance spaces. Moreover, following Performa’s lead, biennials worldwide are making performance integral to their programs. Performance Now is an exhibition that shows how performance has come to be at the center of the discussion on the latest developments in contemporary art and culture. The first decade of the 21st century has seen the emergence of a true globalism in the art world, with an ever-expanding map of knowledge and an understanding of cultural developments around the world. A full immersion in historical, political and religious subtexts of a broad range of cultures is now demanded of artists, curators and audiences. There has also been much reflection on the complexities of displaying, collecting, preserving and explaining conceptual material that had so profoundly shaped artistic developments in the final decades of the twentieth century, yet which, paradoxically, was ephemeral and almost invisible. At the same time, contemporary performance is activating the museum, drawing new and young audiences to these institutions.

Performance Now will be made up of objects, ephemera, sound, and video, including material from a number of key Performa commissions, and works originating from around the world including South Africa, China, Eastern Europe, the Americas and the Middle East. In addition, venues have the option to work with Performa to develop a performance program to coincide with their presentations.

Curator

RoseLee Goldberg

RoseLee Goldberg’s seminal study, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (first published in 1979 and now in its third edition) is regarded as the leading text for understanding the development of the genre and has been translated into more than ten languages, including Chinese, Croatian, French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish. When director of the Royal College of Art (RCA) Gallery in London, Goldberg established a program that pioneered an integrative approach to curating exhibitions, performance, and symposia, directly involving the various departments of the RCA in all aspects of the exhibitions program. As curator at The Kitchen in New York she continued to advocate for multi-disciplinary practices to have equal prominence by establishing the exhibition space, a video viewing room, and a performance series. Most recently, her vision in the creation of Performa has set a precedent for performance art that is now impacting museum programming and diverse audiences across the U.S. and abroad.

Touring Schedule

  • Delaware Art Museum
    Wilmington, Delaware
    July 12, 2014 - September 21, 2014
Independent Curators International - State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970
INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL exhibitions

State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970

Linda Mary Montano, Chicken Dance: The Streets of San Francisco, 1972. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Mitchell Payne
Chris Burden, Shoot, 1971. Courtesy University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Eleanor Antin, Representational Painting, 1971. Courtesy the artist and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York
Tom Marioni, One Second Sculpture, 1969. Courtesy the artist
Allen Ruppersberg, Al’s Grand Hotel Life-size Standee, 1971. Courtesy the artist
Martha Rosler, First Lady (Pat Nixon), 1967-72. Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash Gallery, New York
State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970 is a thorough investigation of seminal conceptual and related avant-garde activities in the late 1960s and early 70s and the critical interchange between artists living in the Golden State. While these artists emerged concurrently with those in other parts of the world, many still remain lesser known than their East Coast and European counterparts. State of Mind identifies and investigates California artists' significant contributions in Conceptual art, video, performance, and installation. The exhibition demonstrates the immense changes in artistic practice that coincided with the burgeoning number of art schools and university art departments, nonprofit art spaces, alternative galleries, and artist-run spaces and publications which not only provided exhibition opportunities but, in the relative absence of commercial support, also created a community that fostered an exchange of radical forms and ideas.

Organized around central themes, the exhibition features approximately 150 works by 60 artists, ranging from those who became major international figures to lesser-known artists who nonetheless made important contributions. The exhibition consists of video, film, photography, installation, artist's books, drawing, and paintings. Additionally, there is extensive performance documentation and ephemera.

State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970 is an exhibition curated by Constance Lewallen and Karen Moss and co-organized by the Orange County Museum of Art and the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

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Curator

Constance M Lewallen

Constance Lewallen lives and works in San Francisco, California, where she is adjunct curator at the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. As senior curator there from 1998 to 2007, she curated many national and international traveling exhibitions, including Joe Brainard (2001); Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (2001); Everything Matters: Paul Kos, a Retrospective (2003); Ant Farm 1968–1978 (2004, co-curated with Steve Seid); and A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s (2007). In 2009 she organized Allen Ruppersberg: You and Me or the Art of Give and Take at the Santa Monica Museum; and she co-curated State of Mind: New California Art ca. 1970, with Karen Moss of the Orange County Museum, which opened in 2011. Lewallen has written many essays and articles, and also edited the book Exileé and Temps Morts: Selected Works by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (2009).

Karen Moss

Karen Moss is adjunct curator at Orange County Museum of Art, where she has curated exhibitions including 15 Minutes of Fame: Photographs from Ansel Adams to Andy Warhol (2010); Disorderly Conduct Recent Art in Tumultuous Times (2009) and Art Since the 1960s: California Experiments (2007-2008) and co-curated the 2006 California Biennial. Moss previously held curatorial positions at the San Francisco Art institute, Walker Art Center, Santa Monica Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Moss teaches art history and curatorial practice in graduate programs at Otis College of Art and Design and USC Roski School of Fine Arts.

Touring Schedule

  • The Bronx Museum of the Arts
    Bronx, New York
    June 23, 2013 - September 8, 2013
  • SITE Santa Fe
    Santa Fe, New Mexico
    February 18, 2013 - May 20, 2013
  • Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery
    Vancouver, BC Canada
    September 28, 2012 - December 9, 2012

Booking Info

Number of artists or artist groups: 58
Number of works: 163
Space required: 4,000- 6,000 square feet (required space is flexible, as certain larger installations are optional and the total number of projection rooms in flexible)
Tour dates: July 2012 through December 2013
For additional information, as well as to check specific dates of availability, contact Frances Wu Giarratano, Exhibitions Manager, at 212.254.8200 x 129, or .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Accompanying this exhibition is the State of Mind: New California Art Circa 1970 catalogue, which is available through the BAM/PFA Museum Store.

Independent Curators International - Create
INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL exhibitions

Create

Willie Harris, Untitled, 2010
Jeremy Burleson Lamps, 2007-2010
Attilio Crescenti Untitled, c. 1986
James Montgomery Untitled, 2007
Bertha Otoya Serpiente, 2010
Evelyn Reyes, Carrots, 2009
William Scott, Inner Limits, n.d.
Create is a major group exhibition presenting a selection of the most important works created over the past twenty years by artists involved with three pioneering non-profit organizations: Creativity Explored, Creative Growth Art Center, and the National Institute for Art and Disabilities Art Center (NIAD). These organizations were founded with the belief that exceptional creativity can emerge in anyone and they support the work of artists with developmental disabilities through a unique and highly successful approach to group studio practice. The centers offer an experience that is, in many ways, the antithesis of that envisioned by the art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 when he coined the term “outsider art” to identify the work of artists who have no contact with the art world and who are physically and/or mentally isolated.

This major survey exhibition brings well-deserved attention to this compelling work, sharing it with a broad audience and expanding on its impact on a range of renowned international artists. The exhibition sparks critical dialogue concerning the categories of contemporary art practice, especially the notion of “outsider art,” and challenges audiences to rethink the limitations of such categories. It is clear why works by these artists have been increasingly recognized as a significant contribution to the field of contemporary art, both nationally and internationally, among artists, curators, critics, and collectors, as well as the broader cultural community, and are now in the permanent collections of artists such as Cindy Sherman, Jeremy Deller, Chris Offili, and Peter Doig and in prominent institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. 


Create presents a range of exceptional works in diverse media by twenty artists who have created art works at these centers over the past twenty years. Among the artists included are Judith Scott, William Scott, John Patrick McKenzie, Evelyn Reyes, and Dan Miller. Each artist has sustained an art-making practice at the highest level for many years, and the range of their work is extraordinary: Judith Scott’s visceral sculpture utilizes found materials wrapped in knotted yarn or sting; William Scott’s humorous paintings incorporate sardonic urban motifs; John Patrick McKenzie’s lyrical work employs the repetition of text drawn from pop culture, current events, and his immediate surroundings; Evelyn Reyes’s pastel drawings feature bold, minimalistic shapes; and Dan Miller’s intricate work includes drawings and paintings incorporating layered text.

More information about the original iteration of the exhibition can be found on The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA) website here.

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Curator

Lawrence Rinder

Lawrence Rinder is Director of the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, having previously held the position of Dean of the California College of the Arts and been the contemporary art curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He is also a writer of art criticism, poetry, drama and fiction.

Matthew Higgs

Honored for his long-term, passionate commitment to supporting artists throughout their careers, for his prolific curatorial and writing career, and for his insight which he shares through his research, exhibitions, writings, and pioneering work at White Columns.

Born in the U.K., Higgs trained and worked as an artist before also becoming known for his independent publishing and curatorial projects that raised the profile of emerging artists through the 1990s. In 2001 he relocated to the U.S., to San Francisco, where he became curator of the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts at the California College of the Arts, and later the co-chair of the College’s MFA program. He now lives and works in New York where for the last six years he has been director of the non-profit art space, White Columns.

For nearly 20 years, Higgs has shown consistent ways to supports artists, artist-groups, and curators, through his writing, interviews, curating, and teaching, as well as his reinvention and on-going development of White Columns as a space for people to experiment with the presentation of new ideas and work. Since 1992 he has organized over 200 artists projects and exhibitions, and written for more than 50 publications and art magazines. He is tirelessly making studio visits and proposing projects with new and overlooked artists, including consistently championing a group of developmentally disabled artists from the non-profit organization Creative Growth by writing on their work and including it in many exhibitions.

Touring Schedule

  • Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery
    Worcester, Massachusetts
    September 1, 2012 - December 8, 2012
  • UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
    Berkeley, California
    May 11, 2011 - September 25, 2011
Independent Curators International - With Hidden Noise
INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL exhibitions

With Hidden Noise

Installation view of Vitiello’s More Songs About Buildings and Bells at Museum 52, New York, 2011
Marcel Duchamp, With Hidden Noise, 1916. Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/Succession Marcel Duchamp.

With Hidden Noise is an exploration of sound art that seeks gallery and museum visitors to spend time listening with ears they may not know they had… Titled after Marcel Duchamp’s ready-made of a ball of string containing a mysterious sound-making object hidden in its folds, this Exhibition in a Box brings together evocative sounds, some recognizable from traditional instruments and field recordings, and others masked through electronic processes.

Sound art has a long lineage that can be traced back to the Futurist manifesto and through to subsequent movements and genres, such as Fluxus conceptual art, performance art, up to the most recent artistic uses of the latest developments in new technologies. Over the last 15 years, a number of larger survey shows have tracked this history, but With Hidden Noise makes an understanding and experiencing of sound art accessible to a wider range of venues.

This self-contained sound art exhibition pairs down the installation scale to a single set of surround sound speakers (5 speakers plus a subwoofer) adaptable to a broad range of spaces, allowing for many presentation possibilities. Also included, are a number of books and catalogs on contemporary sound art that may be distributed around the gallery for those who would like to read more as they listen. A further reading list, videography, and programming suggestions are also provided by the curator, making this exhibition as adaptable and expandable as desired.

Curator

Stephen Vitiello

Stephen Vitiello is a sound and media artist, whose sound installations have been presented internationally both in public spaces and museums. Most recent examples include A Bell For Every Minute, a site-specific project commissioned by Creative Time for the High Line in New York (2010); Tall Grasses, a solo exhibtion at the Salina Art Center, Salina, Kansas (2010); and All Those Vanished Engines at MASS MoCA. Vitiello has collaborated extensively, working with such artists as Tony Oursler, Julie Mehretu, Joan Jonas, Steve Roden, Nam June Paik and Scanner. His work is the subject of a 27-minute documentary produced by Australian TV. Vitiello has received numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship for Fine Arts, Creative Capital funding in the category of Emerging Fields, and an Alpert/Ucross Award for Music. Originally from New York, Vitiello is now based in Richmond, VA where he is on the faculty of Kinetic Imaging at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Touring Schedule

  • Aspen Art Museum
    Aspen, Colorado
    June 10, 2011 - July 10, 2011
Independent Curators International - Martha Wilson
INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL exhibitions

Martha Wilson

Martha Wilson, Martha Wilson as Barbara Bush, March 11, 1991.
Martha Wilson, Posturing: Male Impersonator (Butch), 1973
Martha Wilson, Breast Forms Permutated, 1972
Martha Wilson, Goddess from a Portfolio of Models, 1974
DISBAND, performance at P.S.1, 1979
Guerrilla Girls, Guerrilla Girls Review the Whitney, 1987
Installation view at Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Montreal, Canada
Martha Wilson’s career, spanning forty years, encapsulates the contestations inherent in feminist and socially engaged practices. In her work and throughout her life, Wilson has explored how identity and positioning are not just self-defined or projected, but also negotiated. The complex nature of her work encompasses her activities as an artist, creating conceptually-based performances, videos, and photo-text compositions since the early 1970s; her position as the founder and director of the non-profit space Franklin Furnace; and her collaboration with other women to form the group, DISBAND among many other things. Wilson’s attitude to collaboration and openness to constantly redefining both personal and collective identities make her a central figure with which to collaborate on producing a series of exhibitions that selectively mine the various experimental practices, writings and shifting perspectives to explore current attitudes toward feminism, activism, and collaborative practice.

Written into and out of art history according to the theories and convictions of the time, Wilson first gained attention through Lucy Lippard, who contextualized her early work within the parameters of conceptual practice as well as among other women artists. A year later, in 1974, Wilson was denounced by Judy Chicago after a performance organized by Womanspace in Los Angeles for “irresponsible demagoguery.” She has also been regarded by many as prefiguring some of Judith Butler’s ideas on gender perfomativity though her practice, and more recently, in the words of the art critic, Holland Cotter, she was described as one of “the half-dozen most important people for art in downtown Manhattan in the 1970’s.”

This exhibition has been conceived to facilitate intensive collaborations between the curator(s) at each presenting institution and Martha Wilson. Working from the foundation of objects selected first by curator Peter Dykhuis in conversation with Wilson, each new curator is invited to select from this initial body of works, which provide an overview of the three overlapping stages of Wilson’s career, including a) explorations of her early solo photographic work; b) performance activities in New York, and c) thirty projects drawn from the Franklin Furnace archive, including a rich and compact body of documentation (videos, photographs, announcements, publications, and flyers) of projects by Eric Bogosian, Willie Cole, Jenny Holzer, Tehching Hsieh, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, Ana Mendieta, Shirin Neshat, Dan Perjovschi, William Pope.L, Martha Rosler, and William Wegman, among many others.

Martha Wilson will work with curators of the presenting institutions to further explore ways in which identity and contested histories can be presented in the context of their local constituencies and according to each venue’s programming priorities. Martha will go to the institutions, work with the curator to select works from her own history and that of Franklin Furnace, as well as selecting works from the museum’s collection, or archive, or working with people in that community to develop an exhibition that explores the nature of visibility, or of what feminism means now, or the role of activist, socially engaged practice; the thematic focus will be determined by the local curator in discussion with Wilson. The size of each presentation will depend on space allotted by each venue, and works to be included will result from the conversations and selections made.

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Curator

Peter Dykhuis

Peter Dykhuis is director and curator of the Dalhousie Art Gallery in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Prior to that he was director of the Anna Leonowens Gallery at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and a guest curator for the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. His most recent exhibition is Giving Notice: Words on Walls.

Artists

Martha Wilson

Touring Schedule

  • Utah Museum of Fine Arts
    Salt Lake City, Utah
    August 30, 2013 - November 10, 2013
  • Pitzer Art Galleries
    Claremont, California
    January 24, 2013 - March 22, 2013
  • Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery
    Montreal, Canada
    January 6, 2011 - February 19, 2011

Booking Info

Number of works: to be determined. Selections to be made from the original 58 works, which form the basis from which each local curator selects objects relevant to their own presentation, planned in collaboration with Martha Wilson. All crates will be shipped to each venue, and any unexhibited objects will be safely stored onsite.
Space required: flexible
Tour dates: January 2011 through 2013
For additional information contact Frances Wu Giarratano, Exhibitions Manager, at 212.254.8200 x 129, or .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

Accompanying this exhibition is the Martha Wilson Sourcebook: 40 Years of Reconsidering Performance, Feminism, Alternative Spaces. Please visit our shop for more information.

Independent Curators International - Harald Szeemann: Documenta 5
INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL exhibitions

Harald Szeemann: Documenta 5

Documenta 5 catalogue
Installation view at Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania
Joseph Beuys, aus/from Saltoarte (aka: How the Dictatorship of the Parties Can Overcome), 1975
Robert Morris, "Regarding Documenta V", 1972

ICI’s Exhibitions in a Box series celebrates the fact that interesting projects can come in small parcels, and takes its lead from initiatives such as Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise and George Maciunas’ Fluxkits. Charged with a do-it-yourself imperative, each Exhibition in a Box provides source material from which venues can generate high-content, low-cost exhibitions, adapting and adding to the materials provided according to the space and facilities available. An evolving series developed by artists, curators and art historians, the content of the boxes variously includes small-scale artworks, videos, sound works, instruction works, ephemera and archive materials.

These projects are suitable for all scales of institution, from libraries and artist-run spaces, to art centers, university galleries, museum project spaces, or education centers. Each box will arrive with materials ready to install, requiring little or no equipment for presentation. The projects are conceived to stimulate discussions and events, to be organized by the host venue. Virtually any configuration is possible: for example, the box contents may be added to with contributions from the host venue’s collections and archives, or can be the starting point for an exhibition that presents local artists’ practices in relation to a broader art issue or event. There are three categories of Exhibitions in a Box: key historic precedents that influence art practice and exhibition making now; artist-initiated boxes; and a project series, focusing on one period or range of works from contemporary artists.

The first historic Exhibition in a Box is titled Harald Szeemann: Documenta 5. The materials explore the many facets of one particularly controversial Documenta exhibition, which jumped outside the contemporary art sphere into an expanded realm of activity, a legendary extravaganza that invited both visceral criticism and praise. Generally speaking, Documenta is a major international contemporary art presentation that takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany. This specific 1972 Documenta, chiefly curated by the influential Swiss curator, Harald Szeemann, was a pioneering, radically different presentation that was conceived as a 100-day event, with performances and happenings, outsider art, even non-art, as well as repeated Joseph Beuys lectures, and an installation of Claes Oldenburg’s Mouse Museum, among many other atypical inclusions. The show widely promoted awareness of a contract known as The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement, which protects artists’ ongoing intellectual and financial rights with regard to their production.  This Exhibition in a Box includes the exhibition catalogue, ephemera, artists’ publications and editions produced in conjunction with the exhibition, as well as published reviews and critical responses. The assembled materials provide a rich jumping off point for art history students, artists, and general audiences to plunge into the international contemporary art scene of 1972, to see what this particularly fertile cultural moment produced. Venues might like to host an evening of local artists’ talks about contracts and rights, building from discussion of The Artists Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement, or could work with community groups to generate their own 100-day series of events.

Curator

David Platzker

David Platzker is the director of Specific Object, an innovative gallery, bookshop, and storehouse for a range of items from artist’s multiples to unique works of literature, music, and sound. Prior to founding Specific Object, Platzker was the executive director of Printed Matter, a non-profit institution dedicated to the promotion of artists’ publications from 1998 to 2004, and he has curated exhibitions of artists including John Baldessari, Marcel Duchamp, Ed Ruscha, and Claes Oldenburg.

Artists

Touring Schedule

  • Onsite [at] OCADU
    Toronto, Canada
    October 27, 2012 - January 13, 2013
  • kim?
    Riga, Latvia
    February 18, 2011 - March 27, 2011
  • Contemporary Art Centre
    Vilnius, Lithuania
    January 6, 2011 - February 3, 2011
Independent Curators International - Experimental Geography
INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL exhibitions

Experimental Geography

Installation view at Miller Gallery, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Installation view at Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine
Raqs Media Collective, Erosion by whispers, 2007 (detail)
Installation view at CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY.
Francis Alÿs, The Making of Lima, 2002 (video still)
The manifestations of “experimental geography” (a term coined by geographer Trevor Paglen in 2002) run the gamut of contemporary art practice today: sewn cloth cities that spill out of suitcases, bus tours through water treatment centers, performers climbing up the sides of buildings, and sound works capturing the buzz of electric waves on the power grid. In the hands of contemporary artists, the study of humanity’s engagement with the earth’s surface becomes a riddle best solved in experimental fashion. The exhibition presents a panoptic view of this new practice, through a wide range of mediums including sound and video installations, photography, sculpture, and experimental cartography.

The approaches used by the artists featured in Experimental Geography range from the poetic to the empirical. The more pragmatic techniques include those used by the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) in projects made with students and other non-art groups that aim to strengthen peoples’ roles as agents of change in their own environments. See, for example, their map intended to help longshoremen and truckers identify chokepoints in the cargo trade network. In their similarly empirical projects, the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), a research organization, examines the nature and extent of human interaction with the earth’s surface. CLUI embraces a multidisciplinary approach that forces a reading of the American landscape (such as the disfiguring effects of culling natural resources from the picturesque banks of the Hudson River), thereby refamiliarizing viewers with the overlooked details of their everyday experience.

Curator

Nato Thompson

Nato Thompson is Chief Curator at Creative Time, New York, as well as a writer and activist. Among his public projects for Creative Time are Tania Bruguera’s Immigrant Movement International, Democracy in America: The National Campaign, and Waiting for Godot, a project by Paul Chan held in New Orleans. Thompson was formerly a curator at MASS MoCA, and he also curated ICI’s Experimental Geography, which traveled to eight venues in North America.

Touring Schedule

  • Foreman Art Gallery, Bishop’s University
    Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada
    January 28, 2011 - March 21, 2011
  • Museum London
    London, Ontario, Canada
    October 9, 2010 - January 2, 2011
  • The James Gallery, The Graduate Center at CUNY
    New York, New York
    June 24, 2010 - August 27, 2010
  • The Colby College Museum of Art
    Waterville, Maine
    February 21, 2010 - May 30, 2010
  • Miller Gallery, Carnegie Mellon University
    Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
    October 10, 2009 - January 30, 2010
  • The Albuquerque Museum
    Albuquerque, New Mexico
    June 28, 2009 - September 20, 2009
  • Rochester Art Center
    Rochester, Minnesota
    February 7, 2009 - April 18, 2009
  • Richard E. Peeler Art Center, DePauw University
    Greencastle, Indiana
    September 19, 2008 - December 2, 2008
Independent Curators International - Image Transfer: Pictures in a Remix Culture
INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL exhibitions

Image Transfer: Pictures in a Remix Culture

Lisa Oppenheim, The Sun is Always Setting Somewhere Else… 2006. Courtesy of the artist and Harris Lieberman Gallery, New York
Sean Dack, Glitch Girl #4, 2008. Courtesy of the artist and Fredric Snitzer Gallery
Sara VanDerBeek Caryatid, 2010. Courtesy of the artist and Altman-Siegel Gallery and Metro Pictures
Erika Vogt, Motor Post Motor Band Disband, 2006-2008. Courtesy the artist and Overduin and Kite
Marlo Pascual, Untitled, 2009
Installation view at Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, Washington
Installation view at Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, Washington
Image Transfer: Pictures in a Remix Culture spotlights evolving attitudes toward the appropriation, recuperation, and repurposing of extant photographic imagery. Artists, as both producers and consumers in today’s vast image economy, freely adopt and adapt materials from myriad sources. Images culled from the Internet, magazines, newspapers, advertisements, television, films, personal and public archives, studio walls, and from other works of art are all fair game. Image Transfer brings together artists who divert commonplace, even ubiquitous, visual materials into new territories of formal and idiomatic expression.

This exhibition proposes that these artists mark the progression of intuitive practices that are thoroughly at ease with today’s hyper-fluid circulation of images. In our digital age of fair use and open source, these attitudes demonstrate how far traditional notions of the authority and primacy of source materials have shifted toward a fluent rethinking of the way we value and interact with images. Image Transfer explores several questions. How are artists using clipped, copied, grabbed, or downloaded images, and what do such artistic positions relate to the viewer vis-à-vis the work? How do such synthesized images operate in visual culture? Do these works critique our media-saturated age or are they only symptomatic of it? What can these processes and these composite images tell us about the state of photography today?

Concentrating on a dozen artists, Image Transfer includes photography, painting, drawing, collage, projection, and installation. Growing out of the legacies of Pop, Conceptual Art, the Pictures Generation, experimental film, and avant-garde design, the exhibiting artists employ tactics of transferring, accumulating, and recombining existing images to construct new images, objects, and situations. Notably the techniques of cut-and-paste, re-photography, double exposure, and other object-oriented studio practices commingle with photocopying, scanning, and the commands of editing software. Artists who work across these multiple platforms reflect a systemic evolution that broadly parallels aspects of DJ culture, television and film production, and the DIY movement. The proliferating phenomena of remixes, mash-ups, montage, and collage (and the technologies that enable them) inform an alternative perspective for contemplating developments in visual art in resonance with wide-ranging cultural trends.

Exhibition Updates

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Curator

Sara Krajewski

Sara Krajewski is curator at the Henry Art Gallery. She organized the group exhibitions The Violet Hour (2008) and Viewfinder (2007) as well as solo projects with artists Matthew Buckingham, Walid Raad, Liz Magor, Steven Roden, Kelly Mark, and Santiago Cucullu. Her writing has appeared in Art on Paper, ArtUS, and other publications. Krajewski has held curatorial positions at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art and the Harvard Art Museum.

Touring Schedule

  • Salina Art Center
    Salina, Kansas
    November 9, 2012 - January 18, 2013
  • Newcomb Art Gallery at Tulane University
    New Orleans, Louisiana
    August 15, 2012 - October 15, 2012
  • Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture
    Baltimore, Maryland
    October 6, 2011 - December 10, 2011
  • Richard E. Peeler Art Center, DePauw University
    Greencastle, Indiana
    February 22, 2011 - May 6, 2011
  • Henry Art Gallery
    Seattle, Washington
    October 2, 2010 - January 23, 2011

Booking Info

Number of artists: 12
Number of works: 40
Space required: 4,000 - 5,000 square feet
Tour dates: October 2010 - April 2013
For additional information, as well as to check specific dates of availability, contact Frances Wu Giarratano, Exhibitions Manager, at 212.254.8200 x 129, or .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).


Accompanying this exhibition is the Image Transfer: Pictures in a Remix Culture catalogue, which is available through the Henry Art Gallery.

Independent Curators International - Raymond Pettibon: The Punk Years, 1978-86
INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL exhibitions

Raymond Pettibon: The Punk Years, 1978-86

Installation view at Specific Object, New York
Raymond Pettibon, The Circle Jerks at The Fleetwood / Sat. May 10, 1980
Raymond Pettibon, Black Flag at the Mabuhay / Fri Feb 27 / Sat Feb 28, 1981
Raymond Pettibon,Black Flag With The Ramones and Minutemen at the Hollywood Palladium / Sat Nov 17, 1984
Installation view at the University Galleries at FAU, Boca Raton, FL
Live performance at the University Galleries at FAU

ICI’s Exhibitions in a Box series celebrates the fact that interesting projects can come in small parcels, and takes its lead from initiatives such as Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise and George Maciunas’ Fluxkits. Charged with a do-it-yourself imperative, each Exhibition in a Box provides source material from which venues can generate high-content, low-cost exhibitions, adapting and adding to the materials provided according to the space and facilities available. An evolving series developed by artists, curators and art historians, the content of the boxes variously includes small-scale artworks, videos, sound works, instruction works, ephemera and archive materials.

These projects are suitable for all scales of institution, from libraries and artist-run spaces, to art centers, university galleries, museum project spaces, or education centers. Each box will arrive with materials ready to install, requiring little or no equipment for presentation. The projects are conceived to stimulate discussions and events, to be organized by the host venue. Virtually any configuration is possible: for example, the box contents may be added to with contributions from the host venue’s collections and archives, or can be the starting point for an exhibition that presents local artists’ practices in relation to a broader art issue or event. There are three categories of Exhibitions in a Box: key historic precedents that influence art practice and exhibition making now; artist-initiated boxes; and a project series, focusing on one period or range of works from contemporary artists.

The first of the project series, Raymond Pettibon: The Punk Years, 1978-86, taps into the steady stream of this California artist’s early graphic arts production, before he appeared on the contemporary art stage. It includes over 200 examples of Pettibon’s powerful designs made between 1978 and 1986, when he was immersed in the Los Angeles punk rock scene, doing the graphic design for Black Flag and other punk bands. While Pettibon remains a cult figure among underground music devotees for these early designs, over the past twenty years, he has acquired an international reputation as one of the foremost contemporary American artists working with drawing, text, and artist’s books. Crossing back and forth between music and the visual arts, this project shows Pettibon’s raw imagery, heavily shadowed technique, and characteristic visual punch in formation, and includes 44 zines, 120 fliers, and a selection of album covers.

Most of the designs were done for SST Records, founded by his brother Greg Ginn, who was also guitarist for Black Flag. In addition to the two-dimensional contents in the box, vinyl records of SST bands including Minutemen, Sonic Youth, and Hüsker Dü, as well as a DVD of a 1983 performance of Black Flag, enrich the context and show Pettibon in his original milieu. To adapt the project to their own communities and bring in new audiences, institutions presenting this project might wish to consider inviting innovative local designers to present their own graphics alongside these, or host performances by local bands.

Curator

David Platzker

David Platzker is the director of Specific Object, an innovative gallery, bookshop, and storehouse for a range of items from artist’s multiples to unique works of literature, music, and sound. Prior to founding Specific Object, Platzker was the executive director of Printed Matter, a non-profit institution dedicated to the promotion of artists’ publications from 1998 to 2004, and he has curated exhibitions of artists including John Baldessari, Marcel Duchamp, Ed Ruscha, and Claes Oldenburg.

Touring Schedule

  • McIntosh Gallery
    London, Ontario
    September 13, 2012 - October 27, 2012
  • Visual Arts Center, Boise State University
    Boise, Idaho
    March 7, 2012 - March 28, 2012
  • The University Gallery, University of Massachusetts Lowell
    Lowell, Massachusetts
    January 23, 2012 - February 17, 2012
  • Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson
    Tucson, Arizona
    October 22, 2011 - December 18, 2011
  • University Galleries at Florida Atlantic University
    Boca Raton, Florida
    November 13, 2010 - January 22, 2011
Independent Curators International - The Storyteller
INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL exhibitions

The Storyteller

Steve Mumford, Bathers by the Tigris River, Baghdad. The Fl NG soldiers were looking for weapons caches, Aug, 2003 (from the series Iraq, 2003-05), 2003
Cao Fei, Whose Utopia, 2006
Lamia Joreige, Objects of War n° 3, 2006 (video still). Courtesy of the artist.
Installation view. Parsons, New School. New York, NY.
The Storyteller is an exhibition that focuses on artists who use the story form in contemporary art as a means of comprehending and conveying political and social events. Significantly, unlike their postmodern predecessors, the artists in The Storyteller neither take the idea of documentary truth as an object of their critique nor do they abandon fact for fabulation. Rather, they enable individuals (whether themselves, their subjects or their audience) to construct the story of their unique participation in historical processes, thereby presenting these events in a new and unexpected light.

Responding to the rapid, often violent transformations of the 21st century, contemporary artists have displayed a growing desire to activate art’s documentary capacity, its ability to bear witness to events in the world. All of the works in The Storyteller revolve around situations that are either in the process of unfolding or that continue to impact the lives of the artists or protagonists. However, in each case, these events are re-imagined and thereby re-experienced through the artist’s personal encounter or the character’s narration. For the artists in the exhibition, the story functions neither as a purely imagined narrative nor as a piece of verifiable information. Rather, it is a document of a different sort, one whose focus is less empirical accuracy than the reality of events as they are encountered, experienced and delivered by a thinking, receiving subject and an active listener. The story is at once temporal and personal, public and communal. It persists through the listener’s interpretive process and through each subsequent retelling.

The Storyteller includes an international group of artists working in video, photography, drawing, mixed media and installation: all media that have lent themselves to a documentary approach. Although the featured artists have enjoyed a degree of critical attention, none has yet received serious consideration for the role that storytelling plays in his or her work. In some cases, the artist’s “story” takes the form of a drama based on real events, and in other cases, the stories function less as reconstructions of the past than investigations into the relationship between past and present. A third group appeals to diverse literary genres, and finally, the fourth group of artists initiate a dialogue with active participants in contemporary political situations that their projects then serve to narrate.

For both the film-only version and full exhibition, most of the videos are also available with Spanish subtitles.

Related Events

Curator

Claire Gilman

Claire Gilman (Ph.D. Columbia University) is Curator at The Drawing Center, New York. Gilman has taught art history and critical theory at Columbia University; The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College; The Corcoran College for Art and Design; and MoMA. She has also written extensively for publications including Art Journal, CAA Reviews, Documents, Frieze, and October.

Margaret Sundell

Margaret Sundell (Ph.D., Columbia University) is consulting director of the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program. A former art editor at Time Out New York, her writing has also appeared in Artforum, Art Journal, and Documents. Sundell has taught art history and critical theory at Columbia University, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Parsons The New School for Design.

Touring Schedule

  • Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
    Madrid, Spain (film-only version)
    September 13, 2010 - September 26, 2010
  • Art Gallery of Ontario
    Toronto, Ontario, Canada
    June 9, 2010 - August 29, 2010
  • Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons The New School for Design
    New York, New York
    January 29, 2010 - April 9, 2010
  • Salina Art Center
    Salina, Kansas
    October 22, 2009 - January 3, 2010
Independent Curators International - Broadcast
INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL exhibitions

Broadcast

Gregory Green. WCBS Radio Caroline, The Voice of The New Free State of Caroline, 89.3 FM ([city name]), 2007.Courtesy of the artist and Kinz, Tillou, and Feigen, New York.
Nam June Paik. Video Tape Study No. 3, 1967-69. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle Search – En Busquedad, January 10, 2001

Broadcast explores the ways in which artists since the late 1960s have engaged with, critiqued, and inserted themselves into official channels of broadcast television and radio. By co-opting the sounds, images, and presentation strategies of our culture’s dominant forms of mass media, they reveal the mechanisms and power structures of broadcasting systems, and challenge their authority and influence. The exhibition spans four decades of work by an international group of artists. It begins with Nam June Paik’s manipulated news footage from the late 1960s; moves on to Chris Burden’s infamous 1971 hostage-taking of a TV host at knifepoint; then presents TVTV’s iconoclastic broadcast from the floor of the 1972 Republican convention and a 1980 work made by Doug Hall, Chip Lord, and Jody Procter as artists-in-residence at a Texas news station. More recent works in the exhibition include an installation about aliens by Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, the pirate FM radio-station installation that Gregory Green initiated in the basement of his New York gallery in 1995, neuroTransmitter’s live radio transmission, and Siebren Versteeg’s manipulations of recent CNN broadcasts, which starts off with a contextual scene showing all the artifice that comprises a television news set.

Some of the artists’ interventions are hostile (as in Burden’s work); others are more collaborative, as demonstrated by Christian Jankowski’s 2001 broadcast with a Baptist televangelist, shown on public television. In still other instances, an artist’s engagement with broadcasting involves the critical reuse of previously aired material, such as Antoni Muntadas’s analyses of the structures and presentations of newscasting during the Cold War, or Dara Birnbaum’s incorporation of archival media reports on the 1977 kidnapping and execution of German industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer by the Baader-Meinhof group. Whether appropriating the conventions and programs of broadcast journalism, or engaging in a live TV or radio broadcast themselves, the artists represented here compel us to look more closely at this dominant force in our culture.

Exhibition Updates

Related Events

    No events are currently related to this exhibition.

Curator

Touring Schedule

  • University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum
    Tampa, Florida
    June 4, 2010 - August 7, 2010
  • The Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University
    Hamilton, New York
    February 1, 2010 - March 13, 2010
  • The Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art, Lewis & Clark College
    Portland, Oregon
    September 8, 2009 - December 13, 2009
  • Pratt Manhattan Gallery
    New York, New York
    February 19, 2009 - May 2, 2009
  • Museum of Contemporary Art
    Detroit, Michigan
    September 12, 2008 - December 28, 2008
  • Contemporary Museum
    Baltimore, Maryland
    September 8, 2007 - November 17, 2007
Independent Curators International - People’s Biennial
INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL exhibitions

People’s Biennial

Ana Forner, Snowman, 2009
Jennifer McCormick, Medical Demonstrative Evidence, 2006-2010
James Wallner, Masters on Canvas, 2004
Bob Newland, Keepin’ kids off drugs in South Dakota, 1983
Dennis Newell, Lego Battle with Droids and Clones (detail), 2010
Installation view at Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina
People’s Biennial is an exhibition that examines the work of artists who operate outside the sanctioned mainstream art world. As such it recognizes a wide array of artistic expression present in many communities across the United States. Working in cities that are not considered the primary art capitals, the 36 artists in this exhibition present significant contemporary work ranging from documentary photographs of military life in the heartland, to video works focusing on the biological activity in urban ecosystems, and complex, minute marble-like sculptures carved out of soap bars. In covering even the little-known, the overlooked, the marginalized, and the excluded, the exhibition represents a real snapshot of creative practice in America today.

People’s Biennial also proposes an alternative to the standard contemporary art biennial, which mostly focuses on art from a few select cities (New York, Los Angeles, occasionally Chicago, Miami or San Francisco). It questions the often exclusionary and insular process of selecting art that has at times turned the spaces where art is exhibited into privileged havens seemingly detached from the realities of everyday life.

The exhibition is the result of a year of research into the creative communities of five American cities: Portland, Oregon; Rapid City, South Dakota; Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Scottsdale, Arizona; and Haverford, Pennsylvania. In each place, the curators collaborated with an art institution and participated in a series of public events and open-calls, meeting hundreds of artists, which led to the selection of the works on view.

Exhibition Updates

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Curator

Jens Hoffmann

Jens Hoffmann is Director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco. He has curated over three-dozen exhibitions since the late 1990s. He was Director of Exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London from 2003 to 2007. Hoffmann is an adjunct professor at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, a guest professor at the Nuova Accademia de Belle Arti, Milan, and a faculty member at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He was the co-curator for the 12th Istanbul Biennial in fall 2011.

Harrell Fletcher

Harrell Fletcher is an artist who has worked collaboratively and individually on socially engaged, interdisciplinary projects for more than fifteen years; his work has been exhibited throughout the United States, and in Europe. He is a professor of art and social practice at portland state university in Portland, Oregon.

Touring Schedule

  • Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford College
    Haverford, Pennsylvania
    January 27, 2012 - March 2, 2012
  • Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art
    Scottsdale, Arizona
    October 15, 2011 - January 15, 2012
  • Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art
    Winston-Salem, North Carolina
    July 8, 2011 - September 18, 2011
  • Dahl Arts Center
    Rapid City, South Dakota
    January 14, 2011 - March 27, 2011
  • Portland Institute for Contemporary Art
    Portland, Oregon
    September 10, 2010 - October 17, 2010

Booking Info

This exhibition is fully booked.

Independent Curators International - The New Normal
INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL exhibitions

The New Normal

Jill Magid, Lincoln Ocean Victor Eddy, 2006-07. Courtesy Yvon Lambert Gallery, New York.
Sophie Calle, Unfinished, 2005. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.
Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Vice Presidential Downtime Requirements (formerly titled Band Rider Series: Dick Cheney), 2008. Courtesy Postmasters Gallery, New York.

The practices that demarcate the private sphere are so much a part of the fabric of everyday life—wearing clothing, politely pretending not to overhear a cell-phone conversation—that they only become noticeable when they shift, making the private sphere visible to the public eye. Privacy, to put it bluntly, captures our attention only when it is under threat.

We are living in conditions of heightened surveillance, characterized by the spread of public cameras, luggage searches, Internet monitoring and wiretapping. These supposed deterrents to terrorist activity were dubbed “the new normal” by U.S. vice president Dick Cheney after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. It is a condition that many have become accustomed to, as suggested, for example, by Sharif Waked’s video work Chic Point—a mordant response to being treated as a suspect, in which runway models wear clothing designed for Israeli checkpoints by providing easy access to their midriffs, showing flesh rather than weapons or explosives. The rapid proliferation of technology for social and communications purposes has affected privacy no less profoundly in recent years. Increased use of the Internet has created new platforms for voluntary self-disclosure, from blogs to Facebook. Private information has never been less private, as evinced by Kota Ezawa’s Home Video II, made from “leaked” video files of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s honeymoon, widely available on the Web.

Each of the works in The New Normal—video, Web sites, sculpture, artist’s books, found objects, and photographs—grants access to the private sphere of the artists themselves, of strangers, and of public officials. Overall, the exhibition creates a sense that access to private information is a kind of currency, the exchange of which is growing and evolving in bewildering ways. We may find it frightening or fascinating, but we are all inescapably complicit in it.

Related Events

    No events are currently related to this exhibition.

Curator

Michael Connor

Michael Connor is a curator and media historian based in New York. He is currently developing a permanent exhibition to open at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne. Formerly the head of exhibitions at the British Film Institute, he developed the BFI Southbank Gallery, and was also previously a curator at FACT in Liverpool.

Touring Schedule

  • Art Gallery of Windsor
    Windsor, Ontario, Canada
    April 9, 2010 - July 4, 2010
  • DiverseWorks
    Houston, Texas
    January 15, 2010 - February 20, 2010
  • Pomona College Museum of Art
    Claremont, California
    August 25, 2009 - October 19, 2009
  • Bureau for Open Culture, Columbus College of Art & Design
    Columbus, Ohio
    February 25, 2009 - April 25, 2009
  • The Decker Gallery, Maryland Institute College of Art
    Baltimore, Maryland
    November 6, 2008 - December 19, 2008
  • Huarte Centro de Arte Contemporáneo
    Huarte, Spain
    July 4, 2008 - September 28, 2008
  • Artists Space
    New York, New York
    April 28, 2008 - June 21, 2008
Independent Curators International - FAX
INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL exhibitions

FAX

Matt Sheridan Smith, Untitled (contrast test), 2008
Amanda Ross-Ho, The Cat Will Not Stop Jumping on the Desk, 2009
Yony Waite, Untitled, 2011 (new submission from South Dakota)
Installation view at Plug In ICA, Winnipeg, Canada
Installation view at Para/Site Art Space, Hong Kong
FAX is an evolving exhibition that started in New York in 2009, and continues to be reconfigured, expanded, and localized as it is presented—often simultaneously—in venues worldwide. FAX invites artists, architects, designers, scientists, and filmmakers to think of the fax machine as a drawing tool, resulting in an exhibition concerned with ideas of reproduction, obsolescence, distribution, and mediation. Through the infinitely reproducible, yet erratic outcomes of producing works via the fax machine, this show displaces traditional notions of the hand that are still commonly associated with the medium of drawing, and instead foregrounds drawing as a generative process.

The first iteration of the exhibition featured a core of works by nearly 100 artists, including seminal examples of early telecommunications art. With every new incarnation, the hosting institutions are encouraged to invite additional artists to submit works, which are then permanently added to the show. New participants submit faxes throughout the duration of the presentation using a specially designed cover sheet by Dexter Sinister. Visitors view the collection of faxes on the walls or flip through archival binders to see over 500 pages of works.

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Curator

João Ribas

João Ribas is curator at the MIT List Visual Arts Center and a widely published critic. He was previously curator at The Drawing Center in New York, and is the winner of three consecutive AICA Awards for Best Exhibition (2008/2009/2010) and of an Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award (2010). He has contributed essays to numerous exhibition catalogs and monographs, and has been a visiting lecturer for institutions and organizations worldwide. He was previously adjunct faculty at the School of Visual Arts, New York, and at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Touring Schedule

  • San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery
    San Francisco, California
    May 4, 2012 - July 22, 2012
  • Utah Museum of Contemporary Art
    Salt Lake City, Utah
    March 2, 2012 - June 23, 2012
  • University of Hawaii Art Gallery
    Honolulu, Hawaii
    February 26, 2012 - April 15, 2012
  • DeVos Art Museum
    Marquette, Michigan
    January 13, 2012 - February 24, 2012
  • South London Gallery
    London, UK
    September 22, 2011 - November 27, 2011
  • Knoxville Museum of Art
    Knoxville, Tennessee
    August 26, 2011 - November 6, 2011
  • St Paul St Gallery
    Auckland, New Zealand
    April 8, 2011 - April 30, 2011
  • Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
    Cambridge, Massachusetts
    March 7, 2011 - April 10, 2011
  • Apex Gallery, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology
    Rapid City, South Dakota
    February 15, 2011 - April 3, 2011
  • New Galerie
    Paris, France
    November 6, 2010 - December 18, 2010
  • Dowd Gallery, State University of New York, College at Cortland
    Cortland, New York
    October 7, 2010 - December 10, 2010
  • Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil
    Mexico City, Mexico
    March 24, 2010 - June 20, 2010
  • Burnaby Art Gallery
    Burnaby, Canada
    March 16, 2010 - May 23, 2010
  • Para/Site Art Space
    Hong Kong
    February 1, 2010 - March 31, 2010
  • Torrance Art Museum
    Torrance, California
    January 14, 2010 - February 20, 2010
  • Plug In ICA
    Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
    December 12, 2009 - February 21, 2010
  • Contemporary Museum
    Baltimore, Maryland
    September 12, 2009 - December 20, 2009
  • The Drawing Center
    New York, New York
    April 17, 2009 - July 23, 2009
Independent Curators International - Mixed Signals: Artists Consider Masculinity in Sports
INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL exhibitions

Mixed Signals: Artists Consider Masculinity in Sports

Catherine Opie, Football Landscape #5, (Juneau vs. Douglas, Juneau, Alaska), 2007
Paul Pfeiffer, John 3:16, 2000
Hank Willis Thomas, Scarred Chest, 2003
Installation view at the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA

Photographer Collier Schorr has said, “I want to show the whole temperature of masculinity because—and I can only approach it as a woman—from the outside, masculinity has been depicted in very black-and-white terms.” Accordingly, the artists selected for this exhibition reject such comfortable “black-and-white” imagery. Catherine Opie focuses on the dramatic spectacle of high school football, zeroing in on a tense moment of anticipation just as the players are ready to spring into action, while Brian Jungen sets up a meditative stack of boxes repeating the mesmerizing stare of legendary basketball star, Michael Jordan. Hank Willis Thomas’s photographs deconstruct the ways in which race and sexuality are exploited to brand and market male athletes; and Joe Sola’s video works assume an outsider’s perspective on football, addressing the social exclusivity of competitive athletics through humor and farce.

Several artists and theorists have argued convincingly that social identities—including race, gender, and sexuality—are performed, coded, and contingent. However, the male athlete has been overlooked by artists, art historians and curators until fairly recently, because it is only in the past decade that a critical mass of art addressing this subject has grown large enough to allow for such an exploration.

Mixed Signals is an expanded version of Contemporary Projects 11: Hard Targets: Masculinity and American Sports, an exhibition organized by Christopher Bedford for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in fall 2008.

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Curator

Christopher Bedford

Christopher Bedford is Chief Curator at the Wexner Center.  Recent exhibitions include a survey of Mark Bradford’s work that opened in Columbus in May 2010 and will travel to the ICA Boston, MCA Chicago, Dallas Museum of Art, and SFMoMA, as well as smaller shows of work by Alyson Shotz and Susan Philipsz, and a group exhibition entitled Hard Targets. Projects in progress include solo presentations of work by Erwin Redl, Tobias Putrih and MOS, Katy Moran, Joel Morrison, Nathalie Djurberg, and Paul Sietsema, as well as a Facture and Fidelity: Painting, 1945-2013, co-organized with Katy Siegel, which will open at the Wexner Center in 2013.  He has written extensively on art for publications including Artforum, Art in America, Frieze and October.

Touring Schedule

  • Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University
    Middletown, Connecticut
    September 9, 2011 - October 23, 2011
  • The Andy Warhol Museum
    Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
    May 26, 2011 - August 7, 2011
  • Middlebury College Museum of Art
    Middlebury, Vermont
    February 3, 2011 - April 17, 2011
  • Art Gallery of Calgary
    Calgary, Alberta, Canada
    April 30, 2010 - September 4, 2010
  • Wexner Center for the Arts
    Columbus, Ohio
    January 29, 2010 - April 11, 2010
  • Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture
    Baltimore, Maryland
    October 8, 2009 - December 12, 2009
  • Cranbrook Art Museum
    Bloomfield Hills, Michigan
    February 1, 2009 - March 29, 2009

Booking Info

Number of artists or artist groups: 15
Number of works: 40
Space required: 5,000 square feet
This exhibition is fully booked.

Independent Curators International - Project 35
INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL exhibitions

Project 35

The Propeller Group (Phunam, Matt Lucero, Tuan Andrew Nygyen), Uh…, 2007. Courtesy of the artists
Yukihiro Taguchi, Moment, 2007-08. Courtesy of the artist
Stephen Sutcliffe, Despair, 2009. Courtesy of the artist
Guy Ben-Ner, Berkeley's Island, 1999. Courtesy of the artist
Meris Angioletti, 14 15 92 65 35 89 79 32 38 46 26 43 38 32 79 50 28 84 19 71 69 39 93 75 10, 2009. Courtesy of the artist
Installation view at The College of Wooster Art Museum, Wooster, Ohio
Installation view at TheCube, Taipei Taiwan
Project 35 is a program of single-channel videos selected by 35 international curators who have each chosen one work by an artist that they think is important for audiences around the world to experience today. The resulting compendium is released in four installments and is presented simultaneously in an ever-expanding number of venues.

Project 35 draws in ICI’s extensive network of curators to trace a complexity of regional and global connections among practitioners from places as varied as Colombia, the Congo, and the Philippines, as well as to demonstrate the extent to which video is now one of the most important and far-reaching mediums for contemporary artists. Taking advantage of video’s versatility, Project 35 can be shown in almost any format or space. It can be projected in a gallery, featured in monthly screenings, or shown on a monitor running in the café or education room. Each DVD is accompanied by a pdf with a short introduction to the work by the selecting curator, and the curators’ and artists’ bios.

The Project 35: Interview Series was developed by five M.A. candidates studying within various visual arts fields at NYU during ICI’s Spring 2011 Curatorial Practice course. The online series provides increased engagement with the art and ideas behind Project 35 through interviews with the artists involved in the project and the curators who selected their work.

Read the Project 35 interview series here.

Related Events

Curator

Mai Abu ElDahab

Mai Abu ElDahab lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium, where she has been the director of the non-profit art space Objectif Exhibitions since fall 2007. There, she has organized solo exhibitions by Guy Ben-Ner, Mariana Castillo Deball, Sancho Silva, Michael Smith, Chris Evans, Kirsten Pieroth, and Michael Stevenson, among others. She is a regular guest lecturer at the Higher Institute of Fine Arts (HISK) in Ghent, a member of the editorial board of A Prior Magazine (Ghent), a participant in the Reading Group at the ICA (London). In 2006, she was curator of the exhibition and publication Philip at Project Arts Center (Dublin); co-editor of DOTDOTDOT 13; editor of CAC Interviu 7-8; co-editor with Sven Augustijnen of A Prior 14; guest teacher at the School of Visual Arts (New York); and a member of the curatorial team of Manifesta 6: European Biennale of Contemporary Art in Nicosia, which was canceled before its opening, scheduled for September 2006. In 2009, she co-curated A Fantasy for Allan Kaprow with Philippe Pirotte at the Contemporary Image Collective, Cairo, and is currently working with the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam on their 2010 M.F.A. graduation show.

Magali Arriola

Magali Arriola is based in Mexico City, where she is currently chief curator at the Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, and from 1998 to 2001 was chief curator at the Museo Carrillo Gil. Arriola has also curated Alibis, Mexican Cultural Institute, Paris, and Witte de With, Rotterdam (2002), How to Learn to Love the Bomb and Stop Worrying about It, CANAIA, México City, and Central de Arte at WTC, Guadalajara, Mexico (2003–04), What once passed for a future, or Landscapes of the living dead at Art2102, Los Angeles (2005), Prophets of Deceit at Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco (2006), and the 8th Panama Biennial (2008). She was also a visiting curator at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art in San Francisco in 2006. Arriola has contributed to publications such as Poliéster, ArtNexus, Parachute, Exit, Spike, Afterall and Manifesta Journal.

Ruth Auerbach

Ruth Auerbach is a researcher on visual arts, a curator and contemporary art critic, and is currently director of the Sala Mendoza in Caracas, Venezuela. Since completing her studies at the Central University of Venezuela from 1981 to 1986, she has curated many exhibitions, with a particular focus on the presentation of contemporary art from Venezuela, including Trasatlántica, The America Non Representativa, Museo Alejandro Otero, Caracas (1994), Utópolis, Galería de Arte Nacional, Caracas (2001), Adán y Eva ya no viven aquí, anymore! (Adam and Eve no longer live here, anymore!), Houston Community College, Texas, as part of Fotofest (2002), Transatlantica: The America-Europa Non-Representativa, Museo de Arte Moderno Venezuela, (2005), and Double Perspective: 7 Contemporary Artists from Venezuela, Boliver Hall, London (2007) and Maddox Arts, London (2008). Auerbach has contributed articles to Gego: Obra Completa, 1955–1990, Eugenio Espinoza, and other catalogues and monographs.

Lars Bang Larsen

Lars Bang Larsen is an art historian, independent curator, and writer based in Barcelona and Copenhagen. He has co-curated group exhibitions such as Pyramids of Mars at Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2000), Populism at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2005), La insurrección invisible de un millón de mentes at Sala Rekalde, Bilbao, Spain (2005), and A History of Irritated Material at Raven Row, London (2010). His publications include Sture Johannesson (NIFCA/Lukas & Sternberg, 2002), a monograph about Palle Nielsen’s utopian adventure playgrounds, The Model: A Model for a Qualitative Society, 1968 (MACBA, 2010), and the essay series Kunst er Norm (Art Is Norm) (Aarhus, Denmark: Jutland Art Academy).

Zoe Butt

Zoe is Executive Director and Curator of Sàn Art, Vietnam’s most active independent contemporary art space and reading room in Ho Chi Minh City. From 2007-2009 she was Director, International Programs, Long March Project – a multi-platform, international artist organization and ongoing art project based in Beijing, China.  From 2001-2007 she was Assistant Curator, Contemporary Asian Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia where she assisted in the development of the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT); key acquisitions for the Contemporary Asian art collection, and other associated gallery programs. Her curatorial referral work is pan-Asian, working with private collectors and researchers, independent curators and major museums globally. Zoe is a PhD candidate with the Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics, National Institute for Experimental Arts, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.

Yane Calovski

Yane Calovski is an artist and curator living and working in Skopje. His practice incorporates writing, drawing, video, public actions, publications, installations, and curatorial projects, and his work has been exhibited and published internationally, most recently in a solo exhibition at the European Kunshalle in Cologne, Germany (2009) and in Manifesta 7 in Bolzano, Italy (2008). Calovski is the founder and artistic director of “press to exit project space” in Skopje, Macedonia, and the contemporary art periodical D (D is for Drawing). He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadephia (1992–96) and Bennington College, Vermont (1996–97) and participated in the post-graduate studio program at the CCA Kitakyushu, Japan (1999–2000) and at the Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht, The Netherlands (2002–04). He is currently working on PONDER PAUSE PROCESS (A SITUATION), an exhibition project to be presented at the Tate Britain as part of Contemporary Art Society’s centenary program (2010).

Amy Cheng

Amy Cheng is an art critic and independent curator who lives and works in Taipei. She studied art history at the Graduate School of National Taiwan Normal University in 1996 and taught as a lecturer in the evening program of Fu-Jen Catholic University’s English department (1997–99). Cheng is the founder of TheCube Project Space in Taipei, which opened in 2010. Among the exhibitions she has curated are two group shows at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum—the Taipei Biennial (2004) and Altered States (2006)—and, after that, THTP/Phase Five/Oversight/2008 at Centre A: Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (2008) and Traversing the Fantasy at the Cube Project Space, Taipei (2010). Cheng became feature writer for ARTCO magazine in 2000, and is currently their lead feature writer; and she is the editor/writer of Art and Society: Introducing Seven Contemporary Artists (Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2009).

Ana Paula Cohen

Ana Paula is an independent curator, editor, and writer based in Brazil. She is currently a curator in residence at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Cohen served as co-curator for the 2007 project Encuentro Internacional de Medellín 07 in Colombia, in which she created, in collaboration with other artists and curators, a new center for contemporary art, La Casa del Encuentro; and she was the adjunct curator for the 28th São Paulo Bienal (2008). Cohen has been a contributor to several art magazines, including Frieze, ArtNexus, and Exit Express. She has also organized many conferences and lecture series, including “History as a Flexible Matter: Artistic Practices and New Systems of Reading” in 2008 for the São Paulo Bienal.

Joselina Cruz

Joselina Cruz is an independent curator based in Manila, Philippines. She studied art history at the University of the Philippines, and received an M.A. in curating contemporary art from the Royal College of Art, London. Cruz has worked as a curator for the Lopez Memorial Museum in Manila (2001-04) and the Singapore Art Museum (2004–07). She was a curator for the 2nd Singapore Biennale in 2008 and one of the networking curators for the 13th Jakarta Biennale in 2009. Cruz was curator-in-charge of the Tàpies retrospective at the Singapore Art Museum (2005), co-curated All the Best: The Deutsche Bank Collection and Zaha Hadid, Singapore Art Museum (2006), and curated You Are Not a Tourist for Curating Lab, Singapore (part of the Singapore Art Show 2007) and Creative Index: An Exhibition in Manila (2010) for the 10th Regional Anniversary of the Nippon Foundation’s Asian Public Intellectuals Fellowship program. She also writes essays, reviews, criticism, and art commentary.

Sergio Edelsztein

Sergio Edelsztein is an independent curator based in Tel Aviv, Israel. After studying at Tel Aviv University (1976–85), Edelsztein founded and directed Artifact Gallery in Tel Aviv (1987–95), and in 1998 he founded and became director and chief curator of the Center for Contemporary Art (CCA), also in Tel Aviv. At CCA, he curated seven Performance Art Biennials and four International Video Art Biennials (Video Zone), as well as numerous experimental and video art screenings, retrospectives, and performance events there and elsewhere in Israel. Since 1995, Edelsztein has curated exhibitions and video programs in Spain, China, the U.K., and other nations, as well as the Israeli exhibition at the 24th São Paulo Bienal in 1998 and the Israeli Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005. He has also lectured and written extensively for exhibition catalogues, web sites, and various magazines and journals.

Charles Esche

Charles Esche is a curator and writer. He is Director of van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and co-director of Afterall Journal and Books based at Central St. Martins College of Art and Design, London. He is a visiting lecturer at a number of European art academies and a board member of Manifesta. In 2011 he will co-curate an exhibition of the museum’s collection in the CAPC, Bordeaux entitled Strange and Close. In the last years, he has curated the following biennials 5th U3 triennial in Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2010; 3rd Riwaq Biennale, Ramallah, Palestine, 2009 together with Reem Fadda,  2nd Riwaq Biennale 2007 with Khalil Rabah; the 9th Istanbul Biennial 2005 with Vasif Kortun, Esra Sarigedik Öktem and November Paynter and the Gwangju Biennale 2002 in Korea with Hou Hanru and Song Wang Kyung. Before that he was co-curator of Tate Triennial: Intelligence at the Tate Britain, London and Amateur – Variable Research Initiatives at Konstmuseum and Konsthall, Göteborg, both in 2000.

From 2000-2004 he was Director of the Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, Malmö. From 1998-2002 he organised the international art academic research project called ‘protoacademy’ at Edinburgh College of Art. From 1993-1997 he was Visual Arts Director at Tramway, Glasgow. A book of his selected writings, Modest Proposals, was published by Baglam Press, Istanbul in 2005. He has written for numerous catalogues and magazines including: The Netherlands, for example (ed.), JP Ringier, 2007; Collective Creativity, Fredericianum, Kassel, 2006; Artur Zmijewski, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2005; Shifting Map, NAI, Rotterdam, 2004. He has written for art magazines Artforum, Frieze, Parkett and Art Monthly among others.

Lauri Firstenberg

Lauri Firstenberg is the director and curator of LA>Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945–2001, which originated at the Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; and she was a curatorial assistant for Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany (2002). She has collaborated on exhibitions at LA>

California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art and recently curated projects at ArtPace, San Antonio and Participant Inc, New York. She has taught in the Public Art Studies program at U.S.C. and at SciARC.

Alexie Glass-Kantor

Alexie Glass-Kantor is based in Melbourne, where since 2005 she has been the director and senior curator of Gertrude Contemporary, one of Australia’s longest-running independent art spaces, housing galleries, sixteen artist’s studios, and an international exhibition and residency program. Before that, Glass-Kantor was a curator at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) and worked in state art institutions, museums, independent spaces, and festivals. As a curator, she has contributed to recent projects at institutions including Petronas Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2007), SITE Santa Fe Biennial, New Mexico (2008), National University of Singapore Art Museum, Singapore (2008–09), Magazzino D’arte Moderna, Rome (2009), Ivan Dougherty Gallery, University of New South Wales, Sydney (2009), and Iberia Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2010). Glass-Kantor regularly contributes to symposiums, forums, and journals throughout the Asia-Pacific region; was the Asialink curator-in-residence at Ssamzie Space, Seoul, in 2006; and is a board member of the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA), Australia’s peak body for cultural advocacy.

Julieta Gonzalez

Julieta Gonzalez is associate curator of Latin American Art at Tate Modern, London and an independent curator. She studied architecture at the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas and at the École d’Architecture Paris-Villemin in Paris. From 1997–98 she was a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program, and curator of contemporary art at the Museo Alejandro Otero and Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas from 1999–2003. She was co-curator of the 2da Trienal Poligráfica de San Juan, Latinoamérica y el Caribe with Jens Hoffmann along with Artistic Director Adriano Pedrosa and guest curator Beatriz Santiago. Gonzalez has curated over 30 exhibitions including Juan Downey: El ojo pensante at Fundación Telefónica, Santiago, Chile (2010); Farsites at Insite San Diego/Tijuana (2005) (adjunct curator with curator Adriano Pedrosa); Etnografía modo de empleo at Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas (2003).

Anthony Huberman

Anthony Huberman is a curator and writer based in New York. As chief curator of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, he organized exhibitions of Gedi Sibony, Lutz Bacher, Bruce Nauman, John Armleder, and Olivier Mosset, and initiated the ongoing exhibition series The Front Room. His recent group exhibition, For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there, traveled to museums in London, Detroit, Amsterdam, and Lisbon. He has previously worked as a curator at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and at SculptureCenter in Long Island City, New York, and has published articles in art periodicals including Artforum, Afterall, and DotDotDot. He also co-directs The Steins, an occasional series of short exhibitions in New York.

Mami Kataoka

Mami Kataoka lives and works in Tokyo and London; she is currently chief curator at Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and international associate curator at Hayward Gallery in London. The exhibitions she curated at Mori include Roppongi Crossing: New Visions in Contemporary Japanese Art 2004 (2004), Ozawa Tsuyoshi (2004), All about Laughter (2007), and Ai Weiwei: According to What?(2009). At the Hayward, she curated Laughing in a Foreign Language (2008) and Ujino and the Rotators (2009), and co-curated Walking in My Mind (2009). Before that, she was a chief curator at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery from 1998 to 2002, where she curated Releasing Senses (1999), Tatsuo Miyajima (2000), and Rirkrit Tiravanija (2002), among others. In 2007 she co-curated Beautiful New World: Contemporary Visual Culture from Japan” in Beijing and Guangzhou; and in 2009, she co-curated Discovery: discovering contemporary at ShContemporary in Shanghai and Platform Seoul 2009 (P1).

Constance M Lewallen

Constance Lewallen lives and works in San Francisco, California, where she is adjunct curator at the University of California Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. As senior curator there from 1998 to 2007, she curated many national and international traveling exhibitions, including Joe Brainard (2001); Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (2001); Everything Matters: Paul Kos, a Retrospective (2003); Ant Farm 1968–1978 (2004, co-curated with Steve Seid); and A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s (2007). In 2009 she organized Allen Ruppersberg: You and Me or the Art of Give and Take at the Santa Monica Museum; and she co-curated State of Mind: New California Art ca. 1970, with Karen Moss of the Orange County Museum, which opened in 2011. Lewallen has written many essays and articles, and also edited the book Exileé and Temps Morts: Selected Works by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (2009).

Lu Jie

Lu Jie is currently based in Beijing, where since 2002 he has been chief curator of the Long March Project, a complex, multi-platform, international arts organization and ongoing art project, originally conceived as a series of exhibitions, performances, symposia, and discussions at public sites in China along the route of Mao Zedong’s historic Long March. He graduated in 1988 with a B.F.A. from the China Academy of Arts in Hangzhou, and received an M.A. in curating in 1999 from Goldsmiths College, University of London. Lu is currently an advisor for the Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong; and on the Editorial Board Yishu – Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art (Vancouver). He has curated numerous contemporary art projects and exhibitions, including the following Long March projects, which were presented in various international locations: A Walking Visual Display (2002), The Great Survey of Paper-cutting in Yanchuan County (2004), Yan’an Project (2006), No Chinatown (2007), and Ho Chi Minh Trail (Duong Truong Son) (2008-ongoing). Lu has given lectures and talks at numerous educational institutions and museums in Asia, Europe, and North America.

Raimundas Malasauskas

Raimundas Malasauskas is a writer and curator who lives and works in Paris. From 1995 to 2006 he was a curator at CAC Vilnius and CAC TV; in 2007 he co-wrote the libretto of an opera, Cellador, which was performed in Paris; in 2007–08 he was a visiting curator at California College of Arts, San Francisco, and from 2007 to 2009 he was also a curator at Artists Space, New York. His writings are concerned with contemporary phenomena, biographies and stories, addressing the parallel worlds of science, media, film, literature, and mass culture.

Francesco Manacorda

Francesco Manacorda is an independent curator based in London. He graduated from the University of Turin and received an M.A. in curating contemporary art from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2003. Earlier this year he was appointed artistic director of the 2010 Artissima, the international art fair of contemporary art in Turin (opening November 2010). He worked as a curator at the Barbican Art Gallery, London, 2007–09, and his freelance practice has included curating Subcontinent: The Indian Subcontinent in Contemporary Art, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2006) and national pavilions at the 52nd Venice Biennale (Tobias Putrih, Slovenian Pavilion, 2007 and Francis Upritchard, New Zealand Pavilion, 2009). Manacorda is also currently a visiting lecturer in exhibition history and critical theory in the Curating Contemporary Art department at the Royal College of Art, London. He has written extensively for Domus, Flash Art Italia, Flash Art International, Frieze, Metropolis M, Piktogram, Untitled, and Art Review.

Chus Martinez

Chus Martinez is dOCUMENTA (13) Head of Department, and Member of Core Agent Group, as well as Associate Curator at MACBA, Barcelona, where she was Chief Curator from 2008 to 2010. Previously she was Director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein (2005–08) and Artistic Director of Sala Rekalde, Bilbao (2002–05). For the 50th Biennale di Venezia (2005), Martínez curated the National Pavilion of Cyprus, and in 2010 served as a Curatorial Advisor for the 29th Bienal de São Paulo. She lectures regularly and has written numerous catalogue texts and critical essays.

Viktor Misiano

Viktor Misiano lives in Moscow and in Ceglie Messapica, Italy. He was a curator of contemporary art at the Pushkin National Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow (1980–90) and the director of the Center for Contemporary Art (CAC), Moscow (1992–97). In his freelance practice, Misiano was on the curatorial team for Manifesta 1, Rotterdam (1996) and curated the Russian section of the 3rd Istanbul Biennial (1992), the 46th and 50th Venice Biennale (1995, 2003), the 1st Valencia Bienal, Spain (2001), the 25th and 26th São Paulo Bienal (2002, 2004), the Central Asia Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale (2005), Live Cinema/The Return of the Image: Video from Central Asia, Philadelphia Museum of Art (2007–08), and Progressive Nostalgia: Art from the Former USSR, Centro per l’arte contemporanea, Prato (2007, traveled to Athens; Tallinn, Estonia; and Helsinki). In 1993 he was a founder of the Moscow Art Magazine and has been its editor-in-chief ever since; and in 2003 he was a founder of the Manifesta Journal: Journal of Contemporary Curatorship (Amsterdam-Ljubljana) and since then has also been an editor there. He has been awarded an honorary doctorate from the Helsinki University for Art and Design.

David Moos

David Moos is an independent art adviser, curator and writer based in Toronto, Canada. He received his M.A. and Ph.D in art history, both from Columbia University, New York. Moos was the curator of modern and contemporary art at the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama, from 1998 to 2004, and most recently, the curator of modern and contemporary art at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. He has organized numerous retrospectives and traveling exhibitions, including Jonathan Lasker: Selective Identity (2000) and Radcliffe Bailey: The Magic City (2001), both at the Birmingham Museum of Art, and then, at the Art Gallery of Ontario, The Shape of Colour: Excursions in Colour Field Art, 1950-2005 (2005), and Julian Schnabel: Art and Film (2010). Moos is also a contributing editor to Art Papers and Art US.

Deeksha Nath

Deeksha Nath is an independent critic and curator based in New Delhi. She is a Charles Wallace scholar (funded by the Charles Wallace India Trust under the supervision of the British Council) and has completed her studies in fine arts at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Vadodara, India; City University, London; and Goldsmiths’ College, University of London. She curated House of Mirrors at Grosvenor Vadehra, London (2007); Still/Moving Image, inaugural exhibition of Devi Art Foundation, Gurgaon, India (2008); and co-curated the Best of Discovery section at ShContemporary, the Asia Pacific Contemporary Art Fair, Shanghai (2008), Immersions at Anant Art Gallery, Delhi (2009); and Astonishment of Being at Birla Academy of Art and Culture, Kolkata (2009). She is currently desk editor at Art AsiaPacific, New York and ArtEtc., Kolkata, and her writing has been published widely in books, exhibition catalogues, national and international magazines and journals; she was formerly editor of the web journal www.craftrevivaltrust.org. Deeksha has worked at the Tate Modern, London and the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi.

Simon Njami

Simon Njami lives in Paris, where he is an independent lecturer, curator, and art critic, and a visual-arts consultant for Cultures France, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ cultural branch. He received an M.A. in art history and philosophy and a Ph.D. in law and modern literature. Njami has curated numerous exhibitions of African art and photography, including Die Andere Reise/The Other Journey: Africa and the Diaspora, Kunsthalle Krems, Vienna (1996), Les Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie, Bamako Photography Biennial, Mali (2001 and 2009), Up and Coming, ARCO, Madrid (2003), Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent, Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf (2004–07, traveling to London, Paris, Tokyo, and Johannesburg), and As You Like It, the first African contemporary art fair in Johannesburg (2008), and was also co-curator with Angolese artist Fernando Alvim of the first African Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007). His latest shows are A Collective Diary (Tel-Aviv, 2010), a solo show of Cameroonian artist Bili Bidjocka (Paris, 2010) and A Useful dream (Brussels 2010). Njami is also co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Paris based cultural magazine Revue Noire, and has contributed essays to the catalogue for the Sydney Biennial and other exhibitions. His latest book a biography of President Leopold Sedar Senghor was published in 2007 (Fayard, Paris).

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Hans Ulrich Obrist (b. 1968, Zurich, Switzerland) lives and works in London, where he is co-director of exhibitions and programs and director of international projects at the Serpentine Gallery. Before that, he was curator of Museum in Progress, Vienna, from 1993 to 2000 and has been a curator at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris since 2000. Obrist has curated and co-curated more than 200 solo and group exhibitions and biennials internationally since 1991, including World Soup (1991), Hotel Carlton Palace (1993), do it (1994), Take Me, I’m Yours (1995), Manifesta 1 (1996), Live/Life (1996), Cities on the Move (1997), Nuit Blanche (1998), 1st Berlin Biennial (1998), Laboratorium (1999), Utopia Station (2003), Dakar Biennale (2004), 2nd Guangzhou Triennial (2005), 1st & 2nd Moscow Biennale (2005 and 2007), Lyon Biennale (2007), and Yokohama Triennial (2008). In 2007, Hans Ulrich co-curated Il Tempo del Postino with Philippe Parreno for the Manchester International Festival, also presented in Basel (2009), organized by Fondation Beyeler Art Basel and Theater Basel. In the same year, the Van Alen Institute awarded him the New York Prize Senior Fellowship for 2007–08. In 2008 he curated Everstill at the Lorca House in Granada. Obrist is contributing editor of Abitare Magazine, Artforum, and Paradis Magazine.

Jack Persekian

Jack Persekian is a curator and producer who lives in Jerusalem and in Sharjah, U.A.E. He is the founding director of Anadiel Gallery, the Al-Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art in Jerusalem, and XEIN Productions. Exhibitions he has curated include the Official Palestinian Representation to the São Paulo Bienal (1998), In weiter ferne, so nah, neue palastinensische kunst at Ifa Galleries in Bonn, Stuttgart, and Berlin (2002), Disorientation: Contemporary Arab Artists from the Middle East at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2003), Reconsidering Palestinian Art in Cuenca, Spain (2006), The Jerusalem Show in Jerusalem (2007 and 2009), and DisOrientation II: The Rise and Fall of Arab Cities, at Abu Dhabi Art (2009). He was chief curator of the 7th Sharjah Biennial (2005) and artistic director of the 8th and 9th Sharjah Biennials (2007 and 2009). He has also directed and produced the Millennium Celebrations in Bethlehem, in 2000 and the Palestinian Cultural Evening at the World Economic Forum in the Dead Sea, Jordan (2004).

José Roca

Jose Roca lives and works in Bogotá, Colombia, and in Philadelphia, where he is currently artistic director of Philagrafika 2010, a contemporary printmaking event. From 1998 to 2008 he managed the arts program of the Banco de la República in Bogotá, establishing it as one of the most respected institutions in the Latin American circuit. Roca was a co-curator of the first Poly/graphic Triennial in San Juan, Puerto Rico (2004); the 27th Bienal de São Paulo in Brazil (2006); the Encuentro de Medellín MDE07 (2007); and of Cart[ajena], a series of urban interventions in Cartagena, Colombia (2007). He also served on the awards jury for the 52nd Venice Biennial (2007).

Bisi Silva

Bisi Silva is an independent curator based in Lagos and London and the founder/director of Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, Nigeria (CCA Lagos). As director of CCA Lagos, she curated Fela, Ghariokwu Lemi and the Art of the Album Cover (2007), Ndidi Dike, Waka-into-Bondage: The Last ¾ Mile (2008), George Osodi, Paradise Lost: Revisiting the Niger Delta (2008), and Like A Virgin . . . Lucy Azubuike and Zanele Muholi (2009). In 2006, Silva co-curated the Dakar Biennale in Senegal, and in 2009 she co-curated the 2nd Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, Greece. In 2008 she was co-selector with Portuguese curator Isabel Carlos of the prestigious international Artists’ Prize, Artes Mundi 3 in Wales. Silva has participated in several seminars and conferences locally and internationally and written for international art magazines and journals such as Agufon, Artforum, Artinfo.com, Art Monthly, Untitled, Third Text, and M Metropolis. She is also on the editorial board of N Paradoxa, an international feminist art journal. 

Franklin Sirmans

Franklin Sirmans lives and works in Los Angeles, where he is the department head and curator of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). From 2006 through 2009, he was the curator of modern and contemporary art at the Menil Collection in Houston, where the exhibitions he organized included NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith (which traveled to P.S.1 in New York and to Miami Art Museum); and before that he was co-curator of Basquiat (2005–06: Brooklyn Museum, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston). More recently he co-curated Steve Wolfe: On Paper (2009, Menil Collection and Whitney Museum of American Art). Sirmans was the 2007 recipient of the David C. Driskell Prize awarded by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and in 2009 he received one of the first Gold Rush Award given by the Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation. Sirmans has also written essays for several exhibition catalogues, and articles and reviews in publications such as the New York Times, Time Out New York, Essence, and Grand Street.

Kathryn Smith

Kathryn Smith lives in Cape Town, South Africa, and she is a senior lecturer and head of fine arts studio practice in the Department of Visual Arts, University of Stellenbosch, east of Cape Town. In addition to teaching, she does her own studio work, organizes exhibitions, and does scholarly research. Smith’s writing has been published in catalogues and journals in South Africa and internationally, and she served as a curatorial correspondent for both the 2005 Turin Triennale and the 2008 Biennale of Sydney, participating in discussions and public events for those exhibitions and contributing essays to the catalogues. Her research interests include criminography, camera-based mediums, psycho-geographic art strategies, and historical avant-garde and experimental/radical practices in South African art. She recently established an informal project space in her studio, for her or invited guests to present projects informed by, and directed at, critical conversations about art practice.

Susan Sollins

Susan Sollins lives and works in New York. Sollins is co-founder and executive director emerita of ICI (1975–96), and the founder and executive director of the art organization Art21 (1997- ongoing) and executive producer/curator of its PBS television series “Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century” (2001–ongoing). She was a member of the senior curatorial team at the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum early in her career, and was visual-arts consultant for Thirteen/WNET’s tv program City Arts. Among the exhibitions she has curated are Art in Landscape, (1976–77), New Sculpture: Icon and Environment, (1983–84), Points of View: Four Painters, (1985–86), Eternal Metaphors: New Art from Italy (1989–92), all of which widely traveled through the US, and TABAIMO, 601Artspace, New York (2010); and she has co-curated many exhibitions, including Supershow!, (1979–80), After Matisse, (1986–88), and Team Spirit, (1990–92) all of which traveled to different institutions in the US. She has also made a feature-length film on William Kentridge for broadcast on PBS (2010). Sollins currently serves on the boards of the MacDowell Colony and ICI. She has received a Peabody Award for “Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century” (2007) and the Skowhegan Governors Award for Outstanding Service to Artists (2008).

Mirjam Varadinis

Mirjam Varadinis is a curator and writer based in Zurich, Switzerland. She is a curator for Kunsthaus Zürich, where she has curated many exhibitions, including Aleksandra Mir: Switzerland and Other Islands (2006), Shifting Identities (2008), and Motion Picture(s) (2010). Varadinis also co-curated the exhibition Broken Lines as a part of the annual art festival Printemps de Septembre (2006) in Toulouse, France. Varadinis has contributed to and edited numerous exhibition catalogues, and has also edited Parkett: 20 Years of Artists’ Collaborations.

WHW

What, How & for Whom/WHW is a curatorial collective formed in 1999 and based in Zagreb, Croatia. Its members are Ivet Ćurlin, Ana Dević, Nataša Ilić, and Sabina Sabolović, and designer and publicist Dejan Kršić. WHW organizes a range of production, exhibition, and publishing projects and since 2003 has been directing city-owned Gallery Nova in Zagreb. “What?,” “How?,” and “For whom?” are the three basic questions of every economic organization, and are fundamental to the planning, conception, and realization of exhibitions and the production and distribution of artworks and the artist’s position in the labor market. These questions formed the title of WHW’s first project, in 2000 in Zagreb, dedicated to the 152nd anniversary of the Communist Manifesto, and became the motto of WHW’s work and the name of their collective. Other exhibitions they have curated include Broadcasting Project, dedicated to Nikola Tesla  at the Technical Museum, Zagreb (2002), Looking Awry at Apexart, New York (2003), Side-effects at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade (2004), Normalization  at Gallery Nova, Zagreb (2004), Collective Creativity  at Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel (2005), Final Exhibition at Galerija Nova, Zagreb (2006), and the 11th Istanbul Biennial (2009).

Weng Choy Lee

Weng Choy Lee lives and works in Singapore. He is an art critic and president of the Singapore Section of the International Association of Art Critics. Formerly the artistic co-director of The Substation arts center, Lee is now director of projects, research, and publications at the Osage Art Foundation. He has lectured on art and cultural studies, convened international conferences, and written widely on contemporary art, and is a consultant lecturer at the Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Singapore.

Touring Schedule

  • Raw Material Company
    Dakar, Senegal
    October 18, 2012 - December 31, 2012
  • Richard E. Peeler Art Center, DePauw University
    Greencastle, Indiana
    August 29, 2012 - December 7, 2012
  • North Carolina Museum of Art
    Raleigh, North Carolina
    August 19, 2012 - June 2, 2013
  • Zanabazar Fine Art Museum
    Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
    May 1, 2012 - May 31, 2012
  • Centre PasquArt
    Biel, Switzerland
    April 1, 2012 - April 29, 2012
  • Node Center for Curatorial Studies
    Berlin, Germany
    January 28, 2012 - January 29, 2012
  • Al Hoash Gallery
    East Jerusalem
    January 14, 2012 - January 14, 2012
  • South London Gallery
    London, UK
    September 22, 2011 - November 27, 2011
  • The College of Wooster Art Museum
    Wooster, Ohio
    September 1, 2011 - September 1, 2012
  • Gertrude Contemporary
    Fitzroy, Australia
    July 22, 2011 - August 20, 2011
  • SPACE Gallery
    Portland, Maine
    June 22, 2011 - July 31, 2012
  • Pratt Manhattan Gallery
    New York, New York
    June 17, 2011 - July 30, 2011
  • Michele and Donald D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts
    Springfield, Massachusetts
    June 7, 2011 - June 24, 2012
  • Indianapolis Museum of Art
    Indianapolis, Indiana
    April 1, 2011 - October 30, 2011
  • William Benton Museum of Art
    Storrs, Connecticut
    January 18, 2011 - January 31, 2012
  • TheCube Project Space
    Taipei, Taiwan
    January 15, 2011 - March 13, 2011
  • The Rebecca Randall Bryan Gallery
    Conway, South Carolina
    January 13, 2011 - March 4, 2011
  • Mobile Museum of Art
    Mobile, Alabama
    December 1, 2010 - October 31, 2011
  • New Orleans Museum of Art
    New Orleans, Louisiana
    October 20, 2010 - January 30, 2011
  • Brick + Mortar International Video Art Festival
    Greenfield, Massachusetts
    October 9, 2010 - October 9, 2010
  • Washington Pavilion of Arts and Science
    Sioux Falls, South Dakota
    October 1, 2010 - January 1, 2012
  • San Art
    Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
    September 23, 2010 - January 31, 2011
  • Lifehouse
    Lagos, Nigeria
    August 27, 2010 - August 27, 2010
  • Yaba College of Technology
    Lagos, Nigeria
    August 26, 2010 - August 26, 2010
  • E Për7shmja
    Tirana, Albania
    August 17, 2010 - August 17, 2010
  • Qendra Sociale (Social Center)
    Tirana, Albania
    August 16, 2010 - August 16, 2010
  • Göteborgs Konsthall
    Göteborg, Sweden
    June 4, 2010 - February 13, 2011
  • The Douglas Hyde Gallery
    Dublin, Ireland
    May 13, 2010 - May 13, 2010
  • ceroinspiración
    Quito, Ecuador
    April 22, 2010 - June 23, 2010
  • LAXART
    Los Angeles, California
    March 30, 2010 - March 30, 2010
  • Press to Exit Project Space
    Skopje, Macedonia
    March 29, 2010 - December 31, 2010
  • The Galleries at Moore College of Art and Design
    Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
    March 13, 2010 - March 13, 2011
  • Serialworks
    Cape Town, South Africa
    February 20, 2010 - February 20, 2010
  • Saint Joseph College Art Gallery
    West Hartford, Connecticut
    February 18, 2010 - January 23, 2011
Independent Curators International - Slightly Unbalanced
INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL exhibitions

Slightly Unbalanced

Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn, Winner, 2002. Courtesy the artists and Elizabeth Dee, New York.
Sarah Hobbs, Untitled (Overcompensation), 2006. Courtesy the artist and Solomon Projects, Atlanta.
Installation view, Museum London. Ontario, Canada.

All people have their own psychological quirks; we accept this as an essential element of human nature. During the past fifteen years, more and more artists have been probing these peculiarities, exploring neurosis as a primary subject of their art. Slightly Unbalanced features work that deals with a range of psychological tendencies, including anxiety, obsessive behavior, depression and narcissism. The artists question what constitutes normalcy, and what qualifies as neurosis, a slippery and suggestive endeavor.

The exhibition spans four distinct thematic sections, beginning with works by five internationally renowned individuals—Louise Bourgeois, Sophie Calle, Mike Kelley, Bruce Nauman, and Cindy Sherman—who have been pioneers in addressing psychology in their art, and who have strongly influenced other artists over the past ten or more years. For example, in most of the images in Sherman’s Untitled series from 2000, she plays various female personae who appear palpably uncomfortable in their own skin. Artists who play a performative role in their own videos, as Sherman frequently has in her photographs, are featured in the second section of this exhibition, often focusing on narcissism. The third section of the show offers works in diaristic or confessional formats, as if the viewer is bearing witness to different individuals’ inner monologues, as in Sean Lander’s paintings, videos, and sound works. The last section, which includes several sculptural installations, explores the house as a fertile metaphor for the mind—the domestic interior as a stand-in for the psyche.

The field of psychology is 150 years old, and many of its basic concepts and terminology are embedded in our presuppositions about how people think and act, what drives and motivates us. The artists whose works are presented in Slightly Unbalanced, in choosing to concentrate on neurosis, have tapped into a charged theme that provokes a range of responses, including discomfort, recognition, empathy, and humor. Their development of psychologically loaded subject matter provides a deeply enriched vocabulary for contemporary art.

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Curator

Susan Hapgood

Susan Hapgood is Senior Advisor to ICI, and Founder and Director of the Mumbai Art Room. She was ICI’s director of exhibitions, developing and managing the exhibitions program for seven years until 2010. She has worked in a curatorial capacity for institutions including the Guggenheim Museum, New Museum, and American Federation of Arts. The exhibitions she has curated include FluxAttitudes, Neo-Dada: Redefining Art 1958-62, Video Divertimento, and Slightly Unbalanced, and In Deed: Certificates of Authenticity in Art, and her texts have appeared in publications including Art in America, Frieze, and FlashArt. She received a M.A. in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University.

Touring Schedule

  • Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art
    Richmond, Virginia
    January 26, 2010 - March 5, 2010
  • Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum
    Lafayette, Louisiana
    September 18, 2009 - December 31, 2009
  • Rodman Hall Arts Center
    St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada
    June 12, 2009 - August 21, 2009
  • Huntington Museum of Art
    Huntington, West Virginia
    March 13, 2009 - May 24, 2009
  • Museum London
    London, Ontario
    December 6, 2008 - February 22, 2009
  • Chicago Cultural Center
    Chicago, Illinois
    January 26, 2008 - April 13, 2008
Independent Curators International - Jess: To and From the Printed Page
INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL exhibitions

Jess: To and From the Printed Page

Jess, Cover for o-blek, 1991. Collection of Laree Hulshoff.
Installation view at Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, Wisconsin.
Installation view at Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

Jess (1923–2004) was an influential artist who emerged in the 1950s from within the literary context of Beat culture in San Francisco. Focusing on his intimate ties to poetry, books, and printed matter, Jess: To and From the Printed Page features examples of his celebrated impastos together with many of his collages and designs, as well as the books and magazines in which they were reproduced.

Concentrating on art created especially for publication and reproduction, this exhibition is built on the idea that Jess’s imagery is a form of dialogue with the written word. Jess collaborated extensively with poets and other writers, and worked with small presses and limited-edition publications throughout his life. The diverse, intricate work presented in this exhibition rewards close and sustained viewing, and provides a sense of the intensely fertile literary and art-world environment in which he thrived.

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Jess

Touring Schedule

  • Cornell Fine Arts Museum
    Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida
    January 22, 2009 - March 21, 2009
  • Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art
    Portland, Oregon
    May 8, 2008 - July 20, 2008
  • Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center
    The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas
    February 12, 2008 - April 8, 2008
  • Pasadena Museum of California Art
    Pasadena, California
    October 11, 2007 - January 6, 2008
  • Madison Museum of Contemporary Art
    Madison, Wisconsin
    August 5, 2007 - September 23, 2007
  • San Jose Museum of Art
    San Jose, California
    March 18, 2007 - June 10, 2007
Independent Curators International - Phantasmagoria: Specters of Absence
INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL exhibitions

Phantasmagoria: Specters of Absence

Michel Delacroix, Lisetta, Ferdinand, Saverio, Edward, 1995
Julie Nord, The Hands, 2007 (detail)
Rosangela Renno, Experiencing Cinema, 2004

Long before large art exhibitions and blockbuster shows, crowds were awed by traveling shows called “phantasmagoria” in which familiar scenes and stories were performed with the use of magic lanterns and rear projections to create dancing shadows and frightening theatrical effects. These lively, interactive events incorporated storytelling, mythology, and theater in a single art form that entertained while providing a space for thinking about the otherworldly—playing with the viewers’ anxieties regarding death and the afterlife. A comparable trend can be seen in works by contemporary artists who create ghostly images to reflect on notions of absence and loss, using spectral effects and immaterial mediums such as shadows, fog, mist, and breath.

These artists’ approaches range from the festive to the ironic, counterbalancing the emotionally charged, often somber implications of their subject matter.

The shadow—literally, the absence of light— represents something that is beyond the object yet inseparable from it. In many of the works included in Phantasmagoria, shadows are used to allude to death, the obscure, and the unnamable, and to construct allegories of loss and disappearance. In other pieces, artists evoke the history of the shadow theater, as in a video animation by South African artist William Kentridge, and in the shape-shifting shadow cast by French artist Christian Boltanski’s revolving doll, recalling imagery from the carnival as well as figurines used to celebrate the Mexican Day of the Dead.

Mist, breath, and fog are often associated with mystery; in their double status as perceptible yet almost nonexistent phenomena, they suggest evanescence or absence. Colombian artist Oscar Muñoz has made a series of mirrored surfaces that seem blank until the viewer breathes on them to expose photographic likenesses of people who have died, often under violent circumstances, their images taken from newspaper articles. Mexican artist Teresa Margolles alludes to the dead in much of her art, in this case using vapor to stand in as a metaphor for the absent body, literally incorporating minuscule traces of material washed from corpses in a morgue. Throughout the installations presented here, artists’ use of shadows or actual fog evokes the alluring enigma and magic of phantasmagoria.

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Curator

José Roca

Jose Roca lives and works in Bogotá, Colombia, and in Philadelphia, where he is currently artistic director of Philagrafika 2010, a contemporary printmaking event. From 1998 to 2008 he managed the arts program of the Banco de la República in Bogotá, establishing it as one of the most respected institutions in the Latin American circuit. Roca was a co-curator of the first Poly/graphic Triennial in San Juan, Puerto Rico (2004); the 27th Bienal de São Paulo in Brazil (2006); the Encuentro de Medellín MDE07 (2007); and of Cart[ajena], a series of urban interventions in Cartagena, Colombia (2007). He also served on the awards jury for the 52nd Venice Biennial (2007).

Touring Schedule

  • Salina Art Center
    Salina, Kansas
    December 11, 2008 - February 15, 2009
  • USC Fisher Museum of Art
    Los Angeles, California
    September 3, 2008 - November 8, 2008
  • The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art
    Sarasota, Florida
    May 22, 2008 - August 10, 2008
  • McColl Center for Visual Art
    Charlotte, North Carolina
    February 8, 2008 - April 26, 2008
  • The Contemporary Museum
    Honolulu, Hawaii
    September 1, 2007 - November 25, 2007
  • Museo de Arte del Banco de la República
    Bogotá, Colombia
    March 7, 2007 - June 11, 2007
Independent Curators International - Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art
INDEPENDENT CURATORS INTERNATIONAL exhibitions

Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art

JAM, Noon Solar bag in use, 2004
Andrea Zittel installation view at Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago
Installation view at Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts

Balancing environmental, social, economic, and aesthetic concerns, sustainable design has the potential to transform everyday life and is reshaping the fields of architecture and product design. Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art explores the influence of this design philosophy on artists who combine a fresh aesthetic sensibility with a constructively critical approach to the production, dissemination, and display of art.

Beyond Green includes existing works, commissions, and previously presented work that has been “recycled,” spotlighting ways in which artists are building paths to new forms of practice. Many of the artists work collaboratively and leaven serious social aims with playful, off-the-grid spark, updating the Bauhaus notion of form following function or more recent Beuysian social sculpture. Their approaches range from the metaphorical to the pragmatic, sometimes serving as models for audience activism.

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Curator

Touring Schedule

  • The DeVos Art Museum, Northern Michigan University
    Marquette, Michigan
    January 19, 2009 - March 30, 2009
  • The Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art, Lewis & Clark College
    Portland, Oregon
    September 11, 2008 - December 12, 2008
  • Joseloff Gallery, Hartford Art School, University of Hartford
    Hartford, Connecticut
    April 4, 2008 - June 10, 2008
  • Museum London
    London, Ontario, Canada
    January 5, 2008 - March 16, 2008
  • Richard E. Peeler Art Center, DePauw University
    Greencastle, Indiana
    September 14, 2007 - December 2, 2007
  • Contemporary Arts Center
    Cincinnati, Ohio
    May 5, 2007 - July 15, 2007
  • Smith College Museum of Art
    Northampton, Massachusetts
    February 2, 2007 - April 15, 2007
  • University Art Museum, California State University Long Beach
    Long Beach, California
    November 1, 2006 - December 17, 2006
  • Museum of Arts & Design
    New York, New York
    February 2, 2006 - May 7, 2006
  • Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago
    Chicago, Illinois
    October 6, 2005 - January 15, 2006