G.2 Preceding and Gradually Unfolding: Curatorial Methodologies and Strategic Innovations

Sat Oct 21 / 13:45 – 15:15 / KC 204

chair /
Dr. Toby Lawrence, Open Space Arts Society
As art museums and galleries across North America slowly undergo long-awaited changes addressing systemic racism, discrimination, and heteropatriarchy, there is a need for clearly documented curatorial and “curatorial-like” (Gilchrist 2018) methodologies and strategic innovations preceding and paralleling current dominant conventions, that challenge the legacies of colonialism. Exhibitions and initiatives such as ʻAi Pōhaku, Stone Eaters (University of Hawaii Mānoa, multi-site, 2023), Ayumi Goto and Peter Morin: How Do You Carry the Land? (Vancouver Art Gallery, 2018), lippunga: The Brousseau Inuit Art Collection (Musée des beaux-arts nationale du Québec, 2016), and BUSH Gallery (Secwepemcúłecw, 2013– ) demonstrate deep and considered employment of such emergent and establish methodologies. This panel invites papers and presentations that explore practices redefining curation and expand the accessible record of such curatorial methodologies occurring within academic, museum and gallery, artist-run, land-based, independent, and other contexts.
keywords: curation, decoloniality, strategic innovation, new museology
session type: panel
Toby Lawrence is the Curator at Open Space Arts Society in lək̓ʷəŋən territory. Her work and scholarship centre collaborative, feminist, and relational approaches while exploring modes of curation that challenge racial, gender, cultural, and economic inequalities. She holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies and an MA in Art History & Theory from The University of British Columbia. She was a contributing curator for the inaugural Contingencies of Care Virtual Residency hosted by OCADU, Toronto Biennial of Art, and BUSH gallery; a curatorial resident of the Otis College of Art Emerging Curators Retreat, Los Angeles; and is a co-founder of the Moss Projects curatorial learning and research program in collaboration with Michelle Jacques. Recent publications include the co-authored article “Plant Stories are Love Stories Too: Moss + Curation” for PUBLIC 64 (2021) and “Curatorial Insiders/Outsiders: Speaking Outside and Collaboration as Strategic Intervention” in Indigenous Media Arts in Canada: Making, Caring, Sharing (2023) and forthcoming book chapters for Creative Conciliations: Reflections, Responses, and Refusals and Curatorial Contestations: Critical Methods in Contemporary Exhibition-Making in Canada.

Shallow

Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol, McGill University

As artist Simryn Gill puts it, “Nature has very different logic in different places. And where I grew up nature is very fast. You just have to take your eyes off the ball and you're underneath it again! I lived in a landscape that was said to not hold much history because human traces there rot quickly.” While she was speaking of Malaysia’s coastal rainforests, Gill’s remark conjures the specter of a colonial attitude that justified the denigration of ‘primitive’ cultures globally: quick nature makes for fast forgetting and shallow history. Variations of this climatically-determinist argument have been applied to peoples who created objects that were organic and perishable, and whose making refuses to find static resolution in things that can be conserved, at least by the standards of modern museology.

Based at Singapore Art Museum, Shallow (2021–2024) is a long-term curatorial and research project that takes the tropic’s uniquely accelerated time-genre as a starting point to excavate histories of climate control, art conservation, and conceptual art. If there was a moment in the mid-twentieth century when champions of tropical architecture envisioned a future of museums without air-conditioning, why was that path forsaken? How did the environmental standards associated with the storage of oil painting (~20 degrees Celsius, ~50% relative humidity) come to be universalized in contemporary art museums, even as such conditions do not accord with the needs of recent art? What have artists done to create alternative conditions that reflexively respond to the rise of a globally standardized—and globally unsustainable—climate infrastructure in recent decades?

This presentation will chart the trajectory of this project, which will culminate in a series of publications and programs by artists Simryn Gill and Charles Lim in 2024. The goal of this sharing is to generate a dialogue about the often-conflicting relationship between artistic desires to let art decay, die, and be transformed, and institutional desires for the prolongation of art’s life. How might museums commission, show, and collect works that do not accord with the institution’s attitude towards conservation or environmental control? What role do artists have to play in shaping the future of conversations around institutional commitments to addressing climate emergency at an infrastructural level?

keywords: climate, conservation, museology, infrastructure

Chanon Kenji Praepipatmongkol is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art at McGill University. His work revolves around conditions of artistic production and reception for the global majority, including the precedence of religious forces in modernity, chronic illiberalism, and non-temperate climactic ecologies. His article “David Medalla: Dreams of Sculpture” (2020) was awarded the Oxford Art Journal Essay Prize. A forthcoming curatorial and research project with Singapore Art Museum (2024) brings together histories of climate control, art conservation, and conceptual art in the tropics to ask questions about ontologies of art in an age of environmental crisis. He has also worked on projects for Tate Britain, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Hood Museum of Art, and Jim Thompson Art Center. He holds an MBA and a PhD in History of Art.

dig a hole in the garden: Toward Feminist Post-Capitalist Curatorial Commoning

Julia Prudhomme, McMaster University

This paper draws on the theoretical orientation and case study analysis of Chapter Three of my doctoral dissertation.

From a post-capitalist feminist lens, I investigate the commons as a counter-hegemonic site and temporal phenomenon within capitalist structures, especially in the current financialized neoliberal capitalist contexts. I begin by exploring the socio-historical commons that serve as a device of capitalism through the enclosures. By establishing the contradictions of the commons, I endeavour to turn towards commoning (Harvey, 2011) through a politics of care that enacts a transdualist theoretical orientation to stay below the dualism of capitalist logic (Xiang, 2018).

Commoning processes establish the ground to perform and analyze feminist curatorial commoning practice in contemporary art contexts. The second part of this paper investigates contemporary art practices that embrace the contradictions of the commons and commoning through the site of the garden. Underscoring the interdependency of social reproduction, collective action, and the environment as a political post-capitalist project, the garden becomes a site to explore relationality, slowness, and care within contemporary art contexts. These initiatives primarily occur within urban sites and large-scale exhibition complexes that have proliferated alongside burgeoning strategies of slowness and care in the curatorial. This paper, instead, explores the possibilities of feminist commoning processes from within the rural artist-run centre through a case study analysis of an exhibition-led project, dig a hole in the garden (June–July 2022) at Oxygen Art Centre, co-curated with Greta Hamilton and featuring artists Shannon Garden-Smith and T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss.

keywords: post-capitalist, commoning, social reproduction, garden, rural artist-run centre

Julia Prudhomme is a curator and an artist who lives and works on the tum xula7xw of the sn̓ʕay̓ckstx otherwise known as Winlaw, B.C. She is developing a feminist curatorial practice that focuses upon artistic process, experimentation, and radical care within (and against) institutions. In addition to curatorial projects, Julia holds a Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies at UBC (2013). Her artistic practice is often collaborative, working in video and installation, zines and mixtapes, and has presented this work across Canada, United States, and Europe. Julia has contributed to public art galleries and artist-run centres in numerous capacities for over ten years and continues this work as a doctoral candidate at McMaster University (PhD-c ABD, 2017-present) and Executive Director at Oxygen Art Centre in Nelson, BC (2019-present).

A Curator’s Perspective on a Collection and its Institutional Histories

Marisa C. Sánchez, Lycoming College

This paper discusses my curatorial methodology in Time and Tide Flow Wide: The Collection in Context, 1959 – 1973, a recent exhibition that I curated at the Colby College Museum of Art, which was on view for the duration of the 2022–2023 academic year (September 27, 2022 – June 11, 2023). Starting from the premise that the art museum is a site of power, where knowledge is produced, exchanged, and sometimes contested, this exhibition invited viewers to consider the contexts in which artworks were collected and now reside at Colby, a liberal arts college in Central Maine on the Wabanaki homelands. Informed by new research, my approach revealed the networks of relationships that created the museum and brought into greater focus how the institution emerged during the 1960s, a defining decade not only for the Colby Museum, but also on the world stage, as calls for civil rights drove global protests. The exhibition drew on history, the museum’s archive, and the College’s Special Collections to explore important gaps and absences within the collection. During my research, several questions emerged including: Whose collecting priorities laid the foundation for this museum anchored in American art? Which artworks diverged from that emphasis? What subjects predominate in the collection? How might I contextualize artworks acquired in the early decades of the museum’s history against the larger social, cultural, political, and economic dynamics of the period? And, relatedly, how can we better understand the collection from our perspectives today?

keywords: curation, curatorial, archival research, exhibition histories, museum culture

Marisa C. Sánchez is Assistant Professor of Art History at Lycoming College where she directs the art history program. Her teaching and research interests focus on modern and contemporary art, feminist art histories, art historical methodologies, curatorial practices, museum studies, and the artist interview. Her interdisciplinary approach engages the history of art and counter-narratives, which broadens the scope and understanding of the study of artists and their work. Prior to Lycoming, she was the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow for Research and Scholarly Engagement at the Lunder Institute for American Art at Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine. Sánchez received her Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia in 2019 where she completed her dissertation, The Beckett Effect: The Work of Stan Douglas, Paul Chen, and Tania Bruguera. She also taught art history as a Sessional Lecturer at UBC, Vancouver and Okanagan, and at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.