Review of: The Agency of Access: Contemporary Disability Art and Institutional Critique , Amanda Cachia Philadelphia: Temple University Press (2024), 308 pp., ISBN: 978-1-4399-2622-2, h/bk, USD 94.50 ISBN: 978-1-4399-2623-9, p/bk, USD 19.95 ISBN: 978-1-4399-2624-6, e-book, USD 19.95
In this compiled dialogue, art historian Faye R. Gleisser interviews three leading US-based curators – Allison Glenn, Risa Puleo and Thea Quiray Tagle – on the multidimensional layers of infrastructural, political, personal and material forces informing their independent curatorial work. The experiences and insights shared here, and the personal, social, economic and psychosomatic vulnerabilities named by each curator, generatively offer a critical vocabulary for the pressing, yet often difficult-to-access, aspects of curatorial ethical dilemmas – that which is often left unsaid and that which does not happen, is withheld or remains unrealized or partially legible due to power dynamics and the terms of artmaking, display and funding under neocolonial, white supremacist, anti-Black, anti-immigrant, techno-aggressive sociality.
Jennifer González interviews James Clifford about ‘decolonizing’ practices in museums. Tracing several of Clifford’s key contributions to museum studies, in books such as The Predicament of Culture (1988) and Routes (1997), their conversation briefly traces the early history of scholarly, curatorial and artist interventions in museums in the 1980s and 1990s. Turning to the contemporary moment, the conversation discusses current changes in museum practices of collecting, display and creating relations with diverse stakeholders. Clifford offers a checklist for decolonizing museums, emphasizing the contradictory, precarious ground underpinning all historical and institutional transformations. He advocates a complex, unfinished ‘realism’ of non-guaranteed possibilities.
Review of: Carmen and Antonio Papalia and Guests, Impaired at Tangled: A 4/20 Disability Culture Celebration! Tangled Art + Disability, Toronto, 17 April 2025
Review of: The Political Body: Stories on Art, Feminism and Emancipation in Latin America , Andrea Giunta Berkeley: University of California Press (2023), 320 pp., h/bk, ISBN: 978-0-5203-4432-7, USD 34.95 Diversidad y arte latinoamericano: Historias de artistas que rompieron el techo de cristal , Andrea Giunta Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI (2024), 256 pp., p/bk, ISBN: 978-9-8780-1322-0, USD 24.00
This article examines South African curatorial responses to the COVID-19 lockdowns, focusing on Nina Torr’s practice at the NOW Gallery. The pandemic forced curators to devise unique solutions to continue ‘exhibiting’, and audiences were largely presented with static virtual spaces or viewing rooms. Torr, working in the context of the educational institution The Open Window, presented innovative responses to what she termed ‘lonely curatorial practices’. Exploiting the online collaborative platform Miro, she curated exhibitions addressing the lack of ‘collective viewing’. I argue that her pandemic curating – focusing on space, synchronicity and presence – reveals values for post-pandemic curating, offering strategies for confronting exclusionary power relations in South Africa and elsewhere.
40,000 Years of Modern Art was a remarkable exhibition held in London in 1948 in the unlikely setting of a cinema basement. Conceived by Roland Penrose, and consisting of nearly 200 works from Europe, Africa and the Americas, including Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon , it was the second exhibition organized by the fledgling London Institute of Contemporary Arts. It was notable for the scale of its ambition, the quality of the works included and the speed of its realization. This article asks why 40,000 Years of Modern Art thereafter faded from the public record and has been overlooked subsequently.
Review of: Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader , Patty Ahn, Michelle Cho, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Rani Neutill, Mimi Thi Nguyen and Yutian Wong (eds) Durham, NC: Duke University Press (2024), 416 pp., e-book, ISBN: 978-1-4780-5961-5, USD 31.95
Review of: La Raza Art and Media Collective: 1975–Today Curated by Dave Choberka and Félix Zamora Gómez, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, 7 December 2024–20 July 2025
This article reflects on a performance titled A Button Blanket Dance, A Projected River and A Courthouse (October 2012). Through the act of performance art, Indigenous knowledge and the physical experience(s) of complicated Settler Spaces and Indigenous knowledge(s) in practice, we experience, and attempt to understand, the effects of the difficult political histories that have shaped our experiences of Canada inside of our bodies (Indigenous, Settler, Immigrant, and Refugee).
Review of: Charles Campbell, How Many Colours Has the Sea Curated by Dominique Fontaine, Miguel A. López, Adelina Vlas and Frances Loeffler, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, Canada, 21 September 2024–2 March 2025
Review of: Alex Da Corte, Ear Worm Curated by Alison Hearst, Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Toronto, 8 September 2024–26 January 2025
Review of: La Biennale Internationale Des Jeunes Artistes – Paris (1959–1985), Elitza Dulguerova (ed.) Paris: les presses du reel Institut national d’histoire de l’art (2023), 656 pp., p/bk, ISBN: 978-2-3789-6392-7, €34.00
Review of: Pacita Abad Curated by Victoria Sung, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 9 October 2024–19 January 2025
Review of: Sonia Boyce: Feeling Her Way Curated by Emma Ridgway, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 19 September 2024–6 April 2025
This article examines Indigenous artist interventions challenging settler-colonial narratives at heritage sites, focusing on Rebecca Belmore's Rising to the Occasion and Twelve Angry Crinolines during the 1987 royal tour of Thunder Bay. This performance is situated within a history of Indigenous resistance during British royal visits (1973 and 1987, respectively) to Old Fort William Historical Park that activates visual sovereignty. In their critique of the park's Eurocentric fur trade narratives, the authors position Belmore's performance as a conceptual 'artist-history' intervention, offering possibilities for rethinking curatorial responsibilities and advancing decolonizing practices in cultural institutions, particularly heritage sites and historic museums.
This article examines how perceptions of authenticity and value of the Japanese ceramic collection of William C. Van Horne (1843-1915), assembled in Montreal, Canada, shifted in different contexts over time, from a private collection, to an inherited property, and then a public collection in two museums. By closely tracing the history of this collection with a focus on one tea bowl made by the renowned Japanese potter Nonomura Ninsei, it investigates how various individuals and institutional operations were involved as agents for the meaning-formation of the collected objects-processes that embodied the highly contingent nature of cultural knowledge production.
This article reflects on a performance titled A Button Blanket Dance, A Projected River and A Courthouse (October 2012). Through the act of performance art, Indigenous knowledge and the physical experience(s) of complicated Settler Spaces and Indigenous knowledge(s) in practice, we experience, and attempt to understand, the effects of the difficult political histories that have shaped our experiences of Canada inside of our bodies (Indigenous, Settler, Immigrant, and Refugee).
Building from Right to the City movements, the article addresses the Right to the Museum framework, aiming for urban participation within curatorial, artistic and community-based strategies. The case study traces the genesis of the Wien Museum from a historical bourgeois institution to a contemporary city museum with a spotlight on the year 2015. In addition to an architectural competition, that year was marked by debates on how the museum should incorporate the diverse lived realities of citizens into its programming. Based on documents and interviews, the frictions of urban participation in everyday museum practice are discussed and related to recent museum developments.
This article reflects on MUSE (2014), my curatorial intervention into the Banff Park Museum. In particular, I discuss how the exhibition attempted to disrupt the colonialist stasis of a site that the Historic Sites and Monument Board of Canada has termed a 'museum within a museum'. As a now-anachronistic example of a natural history museum, the Banff Park Museum problematically sustains its colonialist origins in the Canadian West. Working with Jacques Derrida's theory of hauntology from Spectres of Marx (1994), I explore how the curatorial framing of MUSE's interventions dismantled specific ideologies of colonialization and heritage culture.
