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
