Events
The Curatorial Roundtable: Philippe Pirotte (Frankfurt)
The Curatorial Roundtable, an international forum for curators and institutional leaders to discuss formative and current projects, is hosted by Steven Henry Madoff, Founding Chair of the MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Philippe Pirotte was a co-artistic director of the Busan Biennale 2024 and is currently an art history professor at the Städelschule Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Prior to this, he served on the Documenta Commission (2019-2022), which selected ruangrupa as the artistic direction of documenta fifteen (2022). Pirotte held the position of rector of the Städelschule and director of Kunsthalle Portikus between 2014–2020. During this period, he was the artistic director of La Biennale de Montréal (2016) and was a member of the curatorial team of the Karkarta Biennale (2017). He curated the survey exhibition of performance artist Melati Suryodarmo at Bonnnefanten Museum Maastricht, and the group show, Arus Balik. From Below the Wind to Above the Wind and Back Again for the Center for Contemporary Art Singapore (2019). As a regular lecturer, he recently presented at the international forum "Tense Switching: Non-Aligned Movement, Third Worldism and Asian Art" (Asia Culture Centre in Gwangju - South-Korea, December 2018); the symposium "Postcolonial Perspectives from the South" (Goethe Institute Jakarta, January 2019); and the conference "Considering Monoculture" (organized by l’Internationale, MuHKA and Vanabbemuseum, February 2020). Pirotte co-founded the Antwerp contemporary art center, objectif (1999), and from 2005 to 2011, he served as the director of the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland. From 2004 to 2013, he was a senior advisor at the Rijksakademie for Visual Arts in Amsterdam. Pirotte has authored essays and contributions to catalogues on modern and contemporary art. As well, he has served as the editor of numerous volumes, including An Anthology of Published & Unpublished Writings by Hassan Khan (2019).
Pirotte will talk about the experience of curating the Busan Biennale in South Korea (busanbiennale2024.com/en) and about an exhibition, Spectres of Bandung, that he is preparing for the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, after it was cancelled at Gropius Bau Berlin in 2023. It is based on research he started in 2019 and an online conference he organized two years later, "The Color Curtain and the Promise of Bandung" (www.colorcurtain.org). Both exhibitions, Busan and Spectres, are transformative for his work over the last few years, he says. He adds that this work is related to earlier activities, such as the nomination of ruangrupa as artistic directors for documenta fifteen.
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The Curatorial Roundtable: Solvita Krese, Slavs and Tatars (Riga)
The Curatorial Roundtable, an international forum for curators and institutional leaders to discuss formative and current projects, is hosted by Steven Henry Madoff, Founding Chair of the MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
For this special session of the Roundtable, the curators of Survival Kit in Riga will speak about the festival's curation and the urgencies facing curators in Eastern Europe today.
Solvita Krese is the director of and a curator at the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (LCCA) in Riga since 2000. She has been curator and co-curator of a number of large-scale international exhibitions, including Portable Landscapes (co-curated with Inga Lāce and Solvita Krese) that traced and contextualized the emigration and exile stories of Latvian artists throughout the twentieth century. The project was exhibited at Villa Vassilieff, Paris; the Latvian National Art Museum, (2018); and the James Gallery at CUNY, New York (2019) (co-curated with Inga Lāce and Andra Silapētere). Other curatorial ventures include Unexpected Encounters at Den Frie Art Center, Copenhagen and the Latvian National Art Museum (2019, co-curated with Inga Lāce and Andra Silapētere); Identity. Behind the curtain of uncertainty, National Gallery of Ukraine, Kiev (2016); re:visited, Riga Art Space (2014); Telling tales, National Gallery of Art, Vilnius; Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn; Centre for Contemporary Art, CentrePasquArt, Biel (2014); Alternativa, WYSPA, Gdansk (2013), among others. Krese was the commissioner of the Latvian Pavilion for the 56th and 58th Venice Biennales (2015 and 2019). In 2009, she initiated the annual contemporary art festival, Survival Kit, which she has been curating or co-curating ever since.
Since its inception in 2006, the internationally renowned art collective Slavs and Tatars has shown a keen grasp of polemical issues in society, clearing new paths for contemporary discourse as communion, via a wholly idiosyncratic form of knowledge production including popular culture, exhibitions, spiritual and esoteric traditions, oral histories, merchandise, modern myths, as well as scholarly research. Their work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions across the globe, including the Vienna Secession; MoMA, New York; Salt, Istanbul; and Albertinum, Dresden, among many others. The collective’s practice is based on three activities: exhibitions, publications, and lecture-performances. Slavs and Tatars has published more than twelve books to date, including most recently their first children’s book, Azbuka Strikes Back with Walther und Franz König. In 2020, Slavs and Tatars opened Pickle Bar, a slavic aperitivo bar-cum-project space a few doors down from their studio in the Moabit district of Berlin, as well as a residency and mentorship program for young professionals from the region.
Antra Priede is an art historian and curator. She is the vice-rector of the Art Academy of Latvia in Riga. In 2018, she founded and leads research into the specialization of graduate-level curatorial studies. Her concerns also include the history of exile, art during the Soviet period, and the role of the curator in the local and international art ecosystem.
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The Curatorial Roundtable: Nontobeko Ntombela (Johannesburg)
The Curatorial Roundtable, an international forum for curators and institutional leaders to discuss formative and current projects, is hosted by Steven Henry Madoff, Founding Chair of the MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Nontobeko Ntombela is a lecturer in the Department of Curatorial, Public, and Visual Cultures at the Wits School of Arts. Having worked in art galleries, museums, and NGOs, such as the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Durban University Art Gallery, BAT Centre, and others over the course of twelve years, she joined Wits University in 2012, shifting her curatorial practice toward more research-intensive projects on contemporary South African Black women artists of the early twentieth century. During this period, Ntombela has been recognized for such curatorial projects as A Fragile Archive (2013), When Rain Clouds Gather: South African Black Women Artists 1940–2000 (2022), and Then I Knew I Was Good At Painting: Esther Mahlangu, A Retrospective (2024). She is also the co-editor with Reshma Chhiba of The Yoni Book (2019). She has served on various boards and committees for various organizations, including the Visual Arts Network of South Africa; the Department of Arts, Culture, Sports and Recreation; the National Arts Council; and Arts For Human Rights Trust, among others.
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The Curatorial Roundtable: Bernardo Mosqueira (New York and Rio de Janeiro)
The Curatorial Roundtable, an international forum for curators and institutional leaders to discuss formative and current projects, is hosted by Steven Henry Madoff, Founding Chair of the MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Bernardo Mosqueira is the founder and artistic director of Solar dos Abacaxis, in Rio de Janeiro (since 2015) and the director of the Prêmio FOCO ArtRio, Rio de Janeiro (since 2012). a curator, writer, and researcher based in New York. He is the former chief curator at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) in New York. Between 2021 and 2023, Mosqueira was the ISLAA Curatorial Fellow at the New Museum, where he curated seven exhibitions. In 2020, he co-founded Fundo Colaborativo, the first emergency fund for artists and art workers in Brazil. In 2017, he received the Premio Lorenzo Bonaldi per l’ Arte, an international award for young curators, organized by GAMeC, in Bergamo, Italy. His recent exhibitions include Luis Fernando Benedit: Invisible Labyrinths (co-curated with Laura Hakel and Olivia Casa, ISLAA, 2024); Korakrit Arunanondchai: but the words make worlds (Solar dos Abacaxis, 2024); The Precious Life of a Liquid Heart (ISLAA, 2023); Wynnie Mynerva: The Original Riot (New Museum, 2023); and Pepón Osorio: My Beating Heart/ Mi corazón latiente (co-curated with Margot Norton, New Museum, 2023). In 2021, Mosqueira was part of the curatorial team for the fifth New Museum Triennial, Soft Water Hard Stone. In 2023, he was named by Apollo magazine as “one of the 10 most inspirational thinkers living in the US” in their 40 under 40 list. In 2025, Mosqueira was awarded the Vilcek Foundation Prize in Curatorial Work.
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The Curatorial Roundtable: Doreen Ríos (San Diego)
The Curatorial Roundtable, an international forum for curators and institutional leaders to discuss formative and current projects, is hosted by Steven Henry Madoff, Founding Chair of the MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Doreen A. Ríos is a curator, researcher, and doctoral student in Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the University of California, San Diego. Ríos interrogates themes of technological expropriation, tactical media, and the sociopolitical implications of digital cultures. She is the founder of [ANTI]MATERIA, an online platform fostering global dialogue around digital and postdigital art, with a focus on amplifying Mexican and Latin American perspectives. Through [ANTI]MATERIA, she cultivates collaborations among artists, curators, and scholars, advocating for critical discourse on emerging media and materialities. Her curatorial practice spans offscreen, onscreen, and hybrid spaces, with projects including Vanishing Acts (Net.Open, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan, 2025), Postboder (code)pendency (Rhizome, USA, 2025), Espacios Líquidos: Políticas de la Pantalla (Bienal Universitaria de Arte Multimedial, Ecuador, 2023), Minimal Rituals (arebyte, UK, 2023), Cuánto tiempo lleva todo esto derramándose sin desbordarse(Zona Hipermedial, Mexico, 2021), MEME, pronounced not me-me (Off Site Project, UK, 2021), and My Wall is Your Filter Bubble (Abandon Normal Devices Festival, collaboration with Matthew Plummer-Fernández, 2017). From 2019 to 2021, Ríos served as Chief Curator at Centro de Cultura Digital in Mexico City. Her written work on Mexican media art and media theory has been published by institutions such as The Brooklyn Rail, Luna Córnea, Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Goethe Institut Mexico, MOMUS, and Terremoto, a landscape architecture and design studio in Californa. She is an active member of the International Selectors Committee for the Lumen Art Prize and the Leonardo Peer Review Panel, helping to shape the global conversation about digital art’s future. Simultaneously, Ríos conducts experimental research at Unidad de Conciencias Colectivas Terrestres, a collective she co-founded with the artist Ricardo Sierra.
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The Artists Roundtable: Pedro Reyes (Mexico City)
The Artists Roundtable, an international forum for leading practitioners, is hosted by Tamsin Dillon, faculty member of the MA Curatorial program.
Pedro Reyes (b. 1972) is a Mexican artist who has received international attention for large-scale, multidisciplinary projects that address current social and political issues with humor, ingenuity, and often with a participatory approach. Trained as an architect, he primarily identifies as a sculptor and frequently creates installations, performances, and public projects that invite collective action and reflection. His work often transforms objects and situations related to conflict into instruments for positive social change. For example, a socio-political critique of contemporary gun culture is addressed in Reyes’s ongoing Palas por Pistolas, in which the artist worked with local authorities in Culiacán, Mexico, to melt down guns into shovels, then used to plant trees in cities elsewhere in the world. Similarly, in Reyes’ major continuing Disarm series, firearms confiscated by the Mexican government and donated to Reyes have been transformed into instruments, which are then activated by local musicians.
His exhibitions include SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico (2023): Presented his exhibition Direct Action. Marta Herford Museum, Germany (2022): Presented a large body of his early work in his first European solo exhibition. Museum Tinguely, Basel (2020): Solo exhibition featuring Return to Sender, a series of music boxes made from gun parts.Creative Time, New York (2016): Presented Doomocracy, an immersive theatrical installation exploring politics and fear.Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2015): Exhibited the second edition of pUN. Queens Museum, New York (2013): Hosted the first edition of pUN: The People's United Nations, an experimental conference where ordinary citizens act as delegates.
His work is featured in collections internationally including: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Colección Jumex, Mexico City, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Brooklyn Museum, New York.
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The Artists Roundtable: Sandra Mujinga (Oslo)
The Artists Roundtable, an international forum for leading practitioners, is hosted by Tamsin Dillon, faculty member of the MA Curatorial program.
Sandra Mujinga (b. 1989, Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo) is a multidisciplinary Congolese-Norwegian artist, musician, and DJ who explores themes of visibility, surveillance, and speculative fiction. Using a range of media, from textiles and sculpture to video and performance, her practice draws inspiration from Afrofuturism, posthumanism, and animal camouflage to create "other worlds" that challenge established narratives around identity and presence. Mujinga's work often centers on the body and its absence, with a particular focus on Blackness and its representation. She investigates the "economies of visibility," exploring how Black bodies are subjected to unwanted surveillance or are rendered invisible within dominant cultural institutions. In response, she develops alternative strategies for self-representation, preservation, and autonomy. A key element of her practice includes the notion of Speculative World-Building: Inspired by science fiction authors like Octavia Butler, Mujinga builds fantastical, "posthuman" realities where technology, humans, and animals merge. Her unsettling, hybrid creatures—often presented as ghost-like figures or hooded avatars—resist categorization and surveillance. She is also interested in examining survival tactics found in nature, like camouflage, to propose how marginalized bodies can resist observation.
Major exhibitions include: Current: Skin to Skin - Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 13 September 2025 - 11 January 2026, Time as a Shield, Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland (2024), 2023: Fleeting Home, Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig, Germany (2023) IBMSWR: I Build My Skin With Rocks, Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin, Germany (2022–2023) Closed Space, Open World, Malmö Konsthall, Malmö, Sweden (2022), 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, Venice, Italy (2022), Worldview, Swiss Institute, New York, USA (2021), Pervasive Light, New Museum Triennial, New York (2021). Her work is featured in several institutional collections, including: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, Muzeum Sztuki, Warsaw, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin.
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The Artists Roundtable: Amalia Pica (London)
The Artists Roundtable, an international forum for leading practitioners, is hosted by Tamsin Dillon, faculty member of the MA Curatorial program.
Amalia Pica (b. 1978, Argentina) is a London-based Argentine artist whose work explores communication, social participation, and the inherent gaps and failures in human interaction. Her conceptual practice, which uses a wide range of media, often transforms simple, everyday objects into witty and compelling installations, performances, sculptures, drawings, and photographs. Pica's work is informed by her experience growing up in Argentina during the "Dirty War" in the 1970s, a period when the military dictatorship suppressed free speech and expression. This history led her to focus on themes of state control and the ways individuals attempt to communicate and connect with one another. Her work often has a playful, celebratory feel, which she uses to draw viewers into complex, political ideas. Key elements of her practice include communication systems, shared and solitary experience, color and abstraction, the politics of joy and, more recently bureaucracy and language.
Selected major exhibitions include: Amalia Pica: Aula Expandida, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York (2024), ¡Que viva el papeleo!, Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2023), rock comb, Brighton CCA, Brighton, UK (2022), Quasi, Fondazione Memmo, Rome (2022), Round table (and other forms) | Zurich Art Prize 2020, Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich (2020), please open hurry, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2017), ears to speak of, The Power Plant, Toronto (2017), Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2014). Her work is held in the permanent collections of major museums and foundations worldwide including Tate Collection, London, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
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The Artists Roundtable: Sonia Boyce (London)
The Artists Roundtable, an international forum for leading practitioners, is hosted by Tamsin Dillon, faculty member of the MA Curatorial program.
Dame Sonia Boyce OBE RA (b. 1962, London, UK) is an interdisciplinary artist and academic working across film, drawing, photography, print, sound and installation. In 2022, she presented ‘Feeling Her Way’ for the British Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale in Italy, for which she was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. Boyce came to prominence in the early 1980s as a key figure in the burgeoning British Black Arts Movement with figurative pastel drawings and photo collages that addressed issues of race and gender in Britain. Since the 1990s, Boyce has shifted significantly to embrace a social practice that invites improvisation, collaboration, movement, and sound with other people. Working across a range of media, Boyce’s practice today is focused on questions of artistic authorship and cultural difference.
Boyce's work often involves inviting audiences and collaborators to participate in creating immersive, experimental art. Key aspects of her practice include: Art as social practice, Collaborative improvisation, Multi-sensory environments, Boyce explores how art functions within society, generating critical debates about cultural identity and difference.: Since the 1990s, her work has centered on collaboration, with participants responding to environments through unplanned actions like movement, speaking, and singing. Key to her practice is her consistent focus on Black artists and history: as a researcher and academic, Boyce has focused on unearthing and amplifying the contributions of Black and Asian artists who have been overlooked in the story of modern British art. Her Devotional Collection, an ongoing archive project, documents the history of Black British female musicians.
Selected major exhibitions include: Feeling Her Way (2022): Boyce's critically acclaimed Golden Lion-winning installation at the British Pavilion of the 59th Venice Biennale, which celebrated Black British female musicians. In the Castle of My Skin (2020–2021): A traveling exhibition beginning at Eastside Projects in Birmingham, UK, which showcased the depth of her multi-decade career, Devotional (2007): A solo exhibition at London's National Portrait Gallery that featured her archival project celebrating Black British female singers, Sonia Boyce: recent work (1988): A solo show at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London, exhibiting some of her earlier, more figurative works. Boyce's work is featured in numerous prestigious collections, including: Tate, London, Arts Council Collection, London, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
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The Artists Roundtable: Goshka Macuga (London)
The Artists Roundtable, an international forum for leading practitioners, is hosted by Tamsin Dillon, faculty member of the MA Curatorial program.
Goshka Macuga (b. 1967, Warsaw, Poland) is a London-based artist known for her research-intensive and interdisciplinary practice that combines roles of artist, curator, and historian. Through installations, sculptures, tapestries, and collages, Macuga questions how history is constructed and presented by institutions. She often mines institutional archives and incorporates works by other artists, blurring the lines between artmaking and curatorial practice. Macuga's work frequently engages with themes of power, politics, and historical narratives, with a particular interest in institutional histories and moments of social change. Her experience growing up in postwar Poland has given her a unique perspective on examining communism and complicating historical narratives. By incorporating the work of other artists, historical artifacts, and her own creations into her installations, Macuga disrupts traditional art-making hierarchies. Her work extends beyond the scope of a single artist and into curatorial practice, exhibition design, and historical inquiry. In recent years, Macuga has frequently used the historical medium of Gobelin tapestries to create mind maps and panoramic scenes that weave together her research. These tapestries often depict a collage of historical photographs to comment on the relationship between documentation and truth.
Selected major exhibitions include: To the Son of Man Who Ate the Scroll (2016): A solo exhibition at Fondazione Prada, Milan, dOCUMENTA (13) (2012): Macuga's contribution featured the two-part tapestry, Of what is, that it is; of what is not, that is not I. One part was shown in Kassel, Germany, and the other in Kabul, Afghanistan, never to be exhibited together, Exhibit, A (2012): retrospective, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Nature of the Beast (2009) Whitechapel Gallery London, Turner Prize Nomination (2008). Macuga's work is featured in numerous major public collections, including: The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, Tate, London, The Broad, Los Angeles, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago, Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Fondazione Prada, Milan.
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The Artists Roundtable: Samson Young (Hong Kong)
The Artists Roundtable, an international forum for leading practitioners, is hosted by Tamsin Dillon, faculty member of the MA Curatorial program.
Samson Young is a Hong Kong-born artist and composer whose practice uses sound, performance, video, and installation to examine the cultural, political, and historical dimensions of sound. Trained formally in music composition, he employs a multidisciplinary approach, often incorporating rigorous research and fieldwork into his projects. Young's work frequently addresses themes of military conflict, migration, and identity, challenging audiences to reconsider their auditory experiences and the power dynamics embedded within them. His multimedia approach includes performance, site-specific sound installations such as Liquid Borders, animated music videos, and drawings that translate musical concepts visually. Central to Young's practice is his innovative approach to sound, often through a process he describes as "muting". By consciously suppressing dominant sounds, he creates space to reveal unheard or marginalized sonic elements. His projects often involve collecting "sound sketches" and recordings from historically significant conflict sites, which are then reinterpreted through his work. In one notable project, Nocturne (2015), Young recreated the sounds of nighttime bombings from muted video footage using Foley techniques, which he then broadcast via a pirate radio station. A key aspect of Young’s work is its interdisciplinary nature, combining his musical background with other technologies and mediums. For example he incorporates 3D-printed objects connected to sensor-based programs to create new musical composition systems. His project Intentness and songs (2024) combined 3D-printed sculptures, video, and a soundscape to explore the idiosyncratic rhythms of love, memory, and time, drawing on human and AI memory recall processes.
Selected major exhibitions include: New Work: Samson Young featuring the immersive multimedia installation Intentness and songs. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2024), Silver Moon or Golden Star, Which Will You Buy of Me? Smart Museum of Art, Chicago (2019), Songs for Disaster Relief World Tour M+ Pavilion, Hong Kong (2018), group exhibition One Hand Clapping Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2018), Songs for Disaster Relief, representing Hong Kong, Venice Biennale (2017), "documenta radio" project, Documenta 14 (2017). Young's work is held in the following public collections: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA, Tate, UK, M+ Museum, Hong Kong, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan, Kadist Foundation, Paris, France, Jameel Art Centre, Dubai, UAE, Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, USA.
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The Artists Roundtable: Aliza Nisenbaum (New York)
The Artists Roundtable, an international forum for leading practitioners, is hosted by Tamsin Dillon, faculty member of the MA Curatorial program.
Aliza Nisenbaum (b. 1977 Mexico City) is a New York-based artist known for her vibrant portraiture that makes visible and honors members of diverse, often underrepresented, communities. Her practice is rooted in ethical engagement and is based on intimate, long-term collaboration with her sitters. Nisenbaum's work combines social practice with observational painting, creating a unique dialogue between the artist and her subjects. She spends extended periods with her subjects, often in their homes or workplaces, building deep, personal relationships. Conversations during these sessions inform the final portraits, which capture her subjects' personalities and life experiences. Her subjects often come from distinct social groups, including undocumented immigrants, healthcare workers, community activists, and dancers. By dedicating a traditional, formal portraiture style to these individuals, she challenges historical portrait conventions that typically honored only the wealthy and powerful. Nisenbaum's detailed paintings are rich with patterned textiles, personal objects, and lush interiors that reflect her subjects' cultures and personalities. These elements act as a visual biography, providing a deeper context and narrative for each person.
Selected major exhibitions include: Queens, Lindo y Querido Queens Museum, New York(2023), The Three Divas of Traviata at Gallery Met (2023–2024): a series of portraits of Metropolitan Opera singers and staff. Aliza Nisenbaum, A solo exhibition featuring portraits of UK healthcare and essential workers created during the COVID-19 pandemic. Tate Liverpool (2020), When Home Won't Let You Stay : multi-venue group exhibition, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2019), Art on the Underground Public Commission (2019): A public mural project for London's Brixton Station featuring portraits of Transport for London staff, Whitney Biennial (2017). Nisenbaum's work is featured in numerous prestigious permanent collections, including: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Tate, UK, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Queens Museum, New York.
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The Curatorial Roundtable: Daniela Zyman (Vienna)
The Curatorial Roundtable, an international forum for curators and institutional leaders to discuss formative and current projects, is hosted by Steven Henry Madoff, Founding Chair of the MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Daniela Zyman is a Vienna-based writer, curator, and Artistic Director of TBA21 – Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, based in Madrid, Spain. Since the foundation of TBA21 in 2003, she has played a central role in shaping its program, curating over fifty exhibitions, and contributing extensively to its publishing and commissioning initiatives. Her curatorial practice is rooted in material culture, artistic research, and ecological and post-disciplinary knowledge forms. She consistently engages with alternative epistemologies and speculative modes of world-making, positioning artistic research as a space of critical imagination and ecological thought. Previously, Zyman served as Chief Curator at the MAK – Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art in Vienna (1995-2001), where she co-founded the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles. From 2000 to 2003, she was Artistic Director of the Künstlerhaus in Vienna and Director of A9 Forum Transeuropa. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies and has lectured at institutions including the University of Art and Industrial Design in Linz and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. In 2024, she published The Laughter of the Jellyfish (German edition, Walther König), a monograph that articulates a prefigurative, antagonistic approach to artistic research and traces a genealogy of emergent counter-methods.
This talk reflects on how curatorial practice can serve as research-based and pedagogically driven sense-making–a space of reflection on rapidly changing realities and for harnessing creative forces committed to recomposing the damaged world inside and out. Drawing on recent curatorial projects—Territorial Agency: Oceans in Transformation (Venice), Remedios: Where New Land Might Grow (Córdoba), and Terraphilia: Beyond the Human (Madrid)—the talk proposes curatorial methodologies attuned to the intersecting urgencies of environmental breakdown, historical reckoning, and political disintegration.
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The Curatorial Roundtable: Adam Budak
The Curatorial Roundtable, an international forum for curators and institutional leaders to discuss formative and current projects, is hosted by Steven Henry Madoff, Founding Chair of the MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Adam Budak is the Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Kraków (MOCAK), a curator of contemporary art and author of texts on art. He served as Artistic Director of Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover, Germany (2020–2024), where he developed an interdisciplinary curatorial program focused on the notions of tenderness, anabasis, and amor mundi, and realized exhibitions that, among others frameworks, reflected the avant-garde legacy of El Lissitzky and the topicality of the political thought of philosopher Hannah Arendt. Previously, Budak was Artistic Director and Chief Curator of the National Gallery in Prague (2014–2020), and has also held curatorial positions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and Kunsthaus Graz. From 1997 to 2002, he was Curator of Contemporary Art at Bunkier Sztuki Gallery in Kraków. He co-founded the first postgraduate curatorial studies in Poland at the Jagiellonian University and taught at its Institute of Public Affairs.
Implementing the act of domestication in the biotope of an organic art institution, Budak’s curatorial work focuses on the ecology of affect, the laws of hospitality and the poetics of critical intimacy. His interdisciplinary practice is informed by a sensitivity to space and performativity. He has curated numerous international biennials, including Manifesta 7; the Gherdëina Biennale; the Prague Biennale; and the Polish Pavilion (2003), the Estonian Pavilion (2013), and the Latvian Pavilion (2024) at the Venice Biennale. He also served as a commissioner of the Czech Pavilion (2017, 2018, 2019). Some of his curatorial achievements include the first Polish retrospective of Louise Bourgeois (Zachęta – National Gallery of Contemporary Art, Warsaw, 2003) and the first German exhibition of Paula Rego (Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover 2023).
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Curatorial Roundtable: Henriette Huldisch
The Curatorial Roundtable, an international forum for curators and institutional leaders to discuss formative and current projects, is hosted by Steven Henry Madoff, Founding Chair of the MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Huldisch will speak about three different group shows she has curated or co-curated over roughly the last fifteen years: the 2008 Whitney Biennial (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1974-1995 (MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA, 2018), and the recent permanent collection installation, This Must Be the Place: Inside the Walker’s Collection (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2024 and ongoing).
Henriette Huldisch joined the Walker Art Center as Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Walker Art Center in 2020. Her shows at the Walker include Sophie Calle: Overshare (2024) and This Must Be the Place: Inside the Walker’s Collection (2024). Previously, she was Director of Exhibitions and Curator at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 2010 to 2014, she worked at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, Berlin. She began her career in 2001 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, where she co-curated the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Among her publications are Before Projection (2018), An Inventory of Shimmers (2017), and numerous contributions to exhibition catalogues and periodicals such as Artforum.
Curatorial Roundtable: James Voorhies
The Curatorial Roundtable, an international forum for curators and institutional leaders to discuss formative and current projects, is hosted by Steven Henry Madoff, Founding Chair of the MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Based in Hudson, New York, James Voorhies is a curator and writer currently serving as Curator at Large for The Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach and working independently on projects. He has authored several books, including Postsensual Aesthetics: On the Logic of the Curatorial ( MIT Press, 2023) and Beyond Objecthood: The Exhibition as a Critical Form since 1968 ( MIT Press, 2017). He is editor of the four-volume catalogue raisonné on American artist Tony Smith ( MIT Press, 2024/2025). He has taught art history and curatorial studies at Bennington College and Harvard University, and holds a PhD in modern and contemporary art history from the Ohio State University.
Rewiring Institutions: The Evolution of Curating
Internationally renowned curator and director Maria Lind and leading scholar and theorist Carolina Rito explore how cultural institutions—from museums to contemporary art centers—can be reimagined not just as places for public programming but as networks of people, artifacts, labor, knowledge, and publicness. If the curatorial is understood as a process of knowledge production and a network of activities that shape the ways that institutions work, connect, and interact, how can curating and institutions evolve to transform from within and become more active participants in the social and political systems around them?
MACP Final Exhibitions at the Pfizer Building, 630 Flushing Avenue, Brooklyn, NY. Free and open to the public.
Join us for our openings this Thursday, April 17, 2025, at the Pfizer Building, 630 Flushing Avenue, Brooklyn, NY, 6 - 9 PM. Free and open to the public.
To schedule an appointment to view the exhibitions, please contact macp@sva.edu.
Tenderly Kept: Publicly Narrating Private Objects
Contributors: Arvind Garg, Austin Clay Willis, Budhaditya Chowdhury, Daniela Angelo, David X Levine, Gabriela Valentin, Hajra Sana, Kushan Bhattacharya, MA Interaction Design, Manuel Mata, Oorja Garg, Paola Pomarico, Payal Arya, Printed Matter, Tsohil Bhatia
Curated by Abbas A Malakar
April 11–April 30, 2025
132 W. 21st Street, 10th floor
April 17–April 30, 2025
630 Flushing Avenue, Brooklyn
Tenderly Kept: an exhibition at the convergence of material culture, oral histories, and fine arts. You have something in your room that no one else will ever relate to. Whatever story it has can be heard and understood, but never truly felt. It belongs to you not only physically but is bound to you spiritually. It is valuable beyond an economic denomination. It is important beyond justifiable explanations. You know it. You feel it. It is a vessel for something that originated from deep within you, in your memories, in your lived experiences, through your actions with it or around it. It is an inalienable extension of you and your identity. You are not alone. We invite you to join our exploration and find what matters to you within the secret realms of private possessions. Our objects might inspire you to share your own stories.
Walking Onward, Staring Below
Artists: Daniel Blanco, Juliana Góngora, Julianne Swartz, Gema Rupérez, Ícaro Zorbár, Juan David Figueroa
Curated by Daniela Marín Aristizábal
April 17–April 30, 2025
630 Flushing Avenue, Brooklyn
Walking Onward, Staring Below brings together artists whose works examine natural processes, mechanisms, and behaviors that have evolved in harmony over millennia. Through delicate symbolic gestures and humble materials, the exhibition reflects on core human qualities—empathy, resilience, awareness, and hope—while questioning the separation humanity has created with the natural world. By engaging with systems beyond their personal experience, the artists reveal the quiet, powerful forces that sustain all forms of life.
AQuÍ TE esPERO
Artists: Andina Marie Osorio, Eros Dibra, Bianka Rolando, Lev Pinkus, The Unsent Project (Rora Blue)
Curated by Gabriela Valentín
April 17–April 30, 2025
630 Flushing Avenue, Brooklyn
Aquí Te Espero is a pause—an inhalation held between presence and absence, between what was and what remains. It lingers in the spaces where words were once spoken and in the silences that followed. The exhibition is not about urgency but the weight of waiting, the quiet resilience of love that does not demand immediate reciprocation. Through photography, text, installations, and video, the artists explore the act of holding space for one another, the invisible threads that connect us beyond time and certainty. To wait is to believe in return or, at least, in the echo of what once was.
Radial Minds
Artists: Natalia Mejia Murillo, Raqs Media Collective, Weina Li
Curated by Oorja
April 17–April 30, 2025
630 Flushing Avenue, Brooklyn
How do we imagine the Alien? Is it a distant Other, or does it demand a radical shift in perspective? The exhibition is a speculative space where thought experiments unsettle fixed ideas about life, knowledge, and existence, urging audiences to leave with more questions than answers. At its core, the exhibition blurs the boundaries between disciplines, merging scientific inquiry and artistic speculation. It interrogates the extractive logics of space exploration, mirroring how nonhuman life is treated on Earth. It combines planetary sciences, astrobiology, and speculative philosophy to rethink how we define life and habitability. To suggest a different way of looking at the planet, the exhibition proposes radial or pentapodal thinking, inspired by Donna Haraway’s sympoiesis (“making-with”), which rejects binaries in favor of tentacular, multidirectional knowledge systems. Can we rethink habitability beyond human-centered narratives? What if we are the Alien? This is not a vision of conquest, but of co-existence, entanglement, and planetary becoming.
Mirological: The Poetics of Mourning
Artists: Jean Marie Casbarian, Nikolay Karabinovych, Leonardo Madriz, Dean Majd, Liliana Merizalde, Nathan Storey
Curated by Sophia-Maria Takvorian
April 17–April 30, 2025
630 Flushing Avenue, Brooklyn
Mirological: The Poetics of Mourning explores this tender and elegiacal subject through the works of artists who have contended with the loss of loved ones, and the consequent sense of self, home, history, and potential futures. Drawing inspiration from mirologia, Greek lamentation songs, the exhibition adopts this colloquial term to describe collective processes of grief and the ways in which artists mold their mourning through their practices. The works on view embody notions of vulnerability, catharsis, and adaptation in the face of loss, and trace notions of collective and individual identity in the shadow of grief and of a society that not only dictates how we must live but also how we must mourn.
Yes, And
Artists: Addam Yekutieli (Know Hope), Alicia Mersy, Jonas Lund, Nancy Holt & Robert Smithson, Unga
Curated by Tom Koren
April 17–April 30, 2025
630 Flushing Avenue, Brooklyn
Yes, And is a group exhibition that takes its cue from the binary frameworks that shape contemporary politics, exploring the possibilities or limitations that arise from the attempt to hold multiple—and sometimes contradictory—truths. Through the work of six artists creating across diverse mediums, the exhibition offers a critical reflection on processes of ideological adherence and tribalist allegiance, particularly in light of the deepening polarization and crisis of communication that prevail in the digital age. In mirroring and complicating the dichotomies that underlie social conflict, Yes, And sheds light on the ways in which politics of division are employed as strategies of control, asking whether it is possible to resist these divides without blurring differences or promoting neutrality.
Was I Ever Really Here?
Artists: Sheila Carr, Rowan Renee, Ari Temkin, Hinda Weiss, Yujie Zhou
Curated by Sophie Barfod, Kyle Colón, Anajoara Eom, Yvetta Zheng
April 17–April 30, 2025
630 Flushing Avenue, Brooklyn
How different is one person from another? The idea of self and Other has been ingrained socially, culturally, and historically. As cultures collide and merge, they become increasingly intertwined, and the lines that once divided them begin to blur. There’s a permeability to the sense of the Other. Anyone can find themselves between these blurred lines—a space they may have previously thought themselves on only one side of. It’s not enough to question one’s place to understand one’s role as Other. To comprehend this permeability is to acknowledge its often contradictory nature. Through various means of investigation, including self-parody, interviews, archival recollections, and historical analysis, Was I Ever Really Here? seeks to explore not only one’s existence as Other but also one’s complicity in the process of Othering. What does it mean to exist in the in-between?
Curatorial Roundtable: Astrid Peterle
The Curatorial Roundtable, an international forum for curators and institutional leaders to discuss formative and current projects, is hosted by Steven Henry Madoff, Founding Chair of the MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Astrid Peterle is the Head of the Curatorial Department at Kunsthalle Wien. From 2010 to 2022, Peterle worked at the Jewish Museum Vienna, becoming Chief Curator in 2018. Previously, she served as the curator for performance at Donaufestival Krems. At Kunsthalle Wien, she most recently curated the exhibitions of the Kunsthalle Wien Prize (2022 and 2023), awarded annually to graduating students of the Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Applied Arts Vienna. For the Jewish Museum Vienna, she took over the curatorial direction of the new conception of the permanent exhibition Our Middle Ages! The First Jewish Community in Vienna at Museum Judenplatz (2018–2021). Peterle is the curator and author of numerous exhibitions and articles on Viennese cultural history and contemporary art, especially choreography, performance art, photography, and feminist art practice.
In-person: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev Distinguished Global Curator Lecture
Angels and Engineers: Art, Artists, and Exhibition-Making in Distracted Worlds
What does it mean to live under a canopy of thousands of partially interconnected engineered satellites circulating above us? Freedom seems to have become an outdated word that was used to describe a feeling of non-oppression, of movement, of choice, of potentiality to act, of self-determination. Freedom of individual choice, however, is no longer freedom in the era of predictive statistics of the algorithm that engineers attention toward personalized choices through our phones that produce chronic distraction; and freedom of expression may no longer be freedom in the era of mass narcissism that relentlessly requires us to produce creative and expressive tangible and intangible goods. In this process, the urgency to safeguard artistic freedom becomes ever more necessary as a space of experimental subjects. Artistic freedom could then be the Angel of History—an intellectual, imaginative, tender horizon that produces online and offline, singular and collective consciousness. While crossing through ruins of expression, artistic freedom produces worlds. Here lies the supreme and welcome outdatedness of the theme of freedom, its libations, the possibility to reinvent its protocols. Satellites, like stars, like exhibitions, are the stuff of angels and engineers. The angels-engineers, with their hierarchies-systems, can be ambivalent experiments in subject-formation, artistic figures of chimeric dystopian and utopian futures whose ideal may be the engineer—a fragile, autistic, and desiring one, dancing with efficiency, eroding and co-emerging with its machinic fields.Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, former director of the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art and artistic director of many biennials and international exhibitions, including the Sydney and Istanbul biennials and dOCUMENTA 13, is considered one of the world’s most influential curators. We are honored to have her deliver our Distinguished Global Curator Lecture.
RSVP here.
Curatorial Roundtable: Lorenzo Balbi
The Curatorial Roundtable, an international forum for curators and institutional leaders to discuss formative and current projects, is hosted by Steven Henry Madoff, Founding Chair of the MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Lorenzo Balbi has been the artistic director of MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna since 2017, when he took on the role of Head of the Modern and Contemporary Art Area of the Istituzione Bologna Musei, including MAMbo, Villa delle Rose, Museo Morandi, Casa Morandi, Museo per la Memoria di Ustica, and Residenza per artisti Sandra Natali. After his studies in Conservation of Cultural Heritage at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, he earned an MA in Contemporary Art at the University of Turin. For four years, he was the artistic director of the Verso Artecontemporanea gallery in Turin. From 2006 to 2017, at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, he taught Methodology of Curating at Campo, a course for curators, and was responsible for the organization and development of exhibition projects in the spaces of the institution in Turin and Guarene d’Alba, as well as the exhibitions of the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Collection abroad. He followed as assistant curator for the project Residenza per Giovani Curatori Stranieri from 2009 until becoming the curator for three editions, from 2015 to 2017. Since 2018, he has taken over the artistic direction of ART CITY Bologna, a series of exhibition events in the city promoted on the occasion of Arte Fiera. Professor of Art Systems at the DAMS of the University of Bologna, he is a member of the board of directors of AMACI – Association of Italian Contemporary Art Museums and of the coordination of the Forum of Italian Contemporary Art.
Curatorial Roundtable: Kjersti Solbakken
The Curatorial Roundtable, an international forum for curators and institutional leaders to discuss formative and current projects, is hosted by Steven Henry Madoff, Founding Chair of the MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Curated by Kjersti Solbakken and titled SPARKS, Lofoten International Art Festival – LIAF 2024 was inspired by the history of the Lofoten Line: one of the world's first experiments in wireless telegraphic communication, which was developed in Lofoten, Norway, in the nineteenth century. The festival constituted a vibrant network of temporary connections, featuring a large exhibition spread across a number of venues alongside a program of lectures and readings, performances, concerts, workshops, and talks in dialogue with a wide range of collaborators and cross-institutional partnerships. Solbakken will present her work on the festival and reflect on how curating LIAF 2024 consisted of archival approaches as well as infrastructural experiments, attempting to discover new ways to write at a distance or signal from a far.
Kjersti Solbakken is a curator, writer, and institutional leader based in Bergen, Norway. Solbakken recently assumed the role of director at Bergen Kunsthall, a center for contemporary art presenting a vibrant program of exhibitions, events, and learning activities, established in 1839. She is the curator of Lofoten International Art Festival (LIAF) 2024, the longest-running art biennial in Scandinavia, presenting works by local and international artists in a location-conscious context. Inspired by the history of the Lofoten Line, one of the world’s first experiments in wireless telegraphic communication, developed in Lofoten in the 19th century, the festival constitutes a vibrant network of temporary connections, featuring a large exhibition spread across multiple venues alongside a program of lectures and readings, performances, concerts, workshops, and talks in dialogue with a wide range of collaborators and cross-institutional partnerships.
Solbakken previously held the position of director at Kunstnerforbundet, one of Scandinavia’s oldest artist-run exhibition spaces, where she oversaw the establishment of Atelier Kunstnerforbundet, a studio collective and network of art enthusiasts focused on engaging the public in the center of Oslo. Other engagements include roles as director of institutions such as Galleri Format and Fotogalleriet in Oslo, and she has curated exhibitions for institutions such as Hordaland Kunstsenter and the Astrup Fearnley Museum. As an active initiator in the self-organized field, she has contributed to the establishment of platforms such as Feil forlag and the project space Holodeck and was, for a period, involved in Tekstallianse, a Nordic festival for micro-publishing and printed matter. She is part of KORO’s curatorial committee LES 2023-2024, a former board member of UKS—Young Artists Society and The Norwegian Association of Curators. Since 2023, she has been an OCA jury member. In 2022, she was granted a curator residency at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) through OCA. She is co-editor of the forthcoming issue of the journal Metode: Currents – Regenerating Pasts for the Not Yet.
Curators Professional Development Workshop
Navigating the art world as a curator, both inside and outside of institutions, is always challenging. In this two-session professional development workshop, including presentations and discussions with audience members, we invite several curators who have emerged as leading voices in recent years to address how they have succeeded, the issues they have faced, how they work within the structures of their institutions, and how they negotiate their curatorial work, given the pressures within institutions and the urgencies of our time. The goal of the workshop is to share histories and strategies and to network with other curators in the field.
Curatorial Roundtable: Zeynep Oz
The Curatorial Roundtable, an international forum for curators and institutional leaders to discuss formative and current projects, is hosted by Steven Henry Madoff, Founding Chair of the MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Zeynep Öz is a curator and writer. She was the Co-founder and Director of the Spot Production Fund, Istanbul (2011–2017), during which time she curated the series “Produce” (I, II, III), commissioning more than 30 projects. Öz curated the off-site Sharjah Biennial 13 project Bahar in Istanbul (2017) as an SB13 interlocutor and has edited and published numerous publications within the scope of the Produce” series and Bahar. Other curatorial projects include Abou Farid’s War, TBA21 on st_age (2021); the BACA exhibition of Marwan Rechmaoui’s work, Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, which traveled to Sharjah Art Foundation (both 2019); Pavilion of Turkey, 58th Venice Biennale (2019); Aichi Triennale 3 (2016); and Greatest Common Factor, SALT, Istanbul (2016). Öz taught at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul (2015–2020), and she served on the curricular and selection committees of the Home Workspace Program, Ashkal Alwan.
Curatorial Roundtable: Nick Aikens
The Curatorial Roundtable, an international forum for curators and institutional leaders to discuss formative and current projects, is hosted by Steven Henry Madoff, Founding Chair of the MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Nick Aikens is a curator, researcher, editor, and educator. He is the Managing Editor of L’Internationale Online. He assumed his role in 2023 as part of the four-year, EU-funded project “Museum of the Commons.” From 2012–2023, Aikens was a curator at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, where he worked on numerous exhibitions and publications as well as leading the research program Deviant Practice (2016–2019). He was a tutor and course leader at the Dutch Art Institute in Arnhem (2012–2019) and a guest professor in the department of Exhibitions and Scenography at Karlsruhe University (2023–2024).
Curatorial Roundtable: Lisa Long
The Curatorial Roundtable, an international forum for curators and institutional leaders to discuss formative and current projects, is hosted by Steven Henry Madoff, Founding Chair of the MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
In this presentation, Lisa Long will speak about her curatorial approach to time-based art, emphasizing the interplay between exhibition dramaturgy, affect, and the political and ethical dimensions of contemporary image production. Drawing on three key projects from her tenure as curator at the Julia Stoschek Foundation, Long will introduce her concept of "exhibition as sensual montage,” a curatorial adaptation of Sergei Eisenstein’s cinematic theory of montage.
Since 2019, Lisa Long has served as Curator and Artistic Director of the Julia Stoschek Foundation in Berlin, one of the world’s most significant collections of time-based art, where she curates large-scale exhibitions, performances, and public programs. Long’s artist-driven curatorial approach amplifies transdisciplinary practices from around the globe, engaging with forms of critical inquiry and storytelling. Her recent group exhibitions include Unbound: Performance as Rupture (2023), examining how the body disrupts the status quo through the camera; and After Images (2024), a recalibration of sight and contemporary image culture; at dawn (2022), envisioning formal and collective utopias; and A Fire in My Belly (2021), exploring artists' negotiations with violence. She has also presented the first solo exhibitions in Germany of numerous artists, including Sophia Al-Maria, Meriem Bennani, Stephanie Comilang & Simon Speiser, Ulysses Jenkins, Rindon Johnson, (LA)HORDE, WangShui, and Young-Jun Tak. In addition, Long is the founder of Companion Studies, a digital journal exploring expanded curatorial practices and has taught curatorial studies at Folkwang University in Essen, Germany.
The Future of the Museum, Part Two
What is the future of museums in a rapidly shifting world? For the second panel in this series of discussions, Işın Önol, Director of Curatorial Research in the master’s degree program in curatorial practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, is joined by cultural strategist András Szántó, author of The Future of the Museum, and Ruba Katrib, Chief Curator at MoMA PS1, among other guests to be announced, to relate the dramatic urgencies of society today to new models for museums, touching on politics, ecology, economic inequity, inclusion, ethical funding, curating, and more.
Curatorial Roundtable: Henk Slager
The Curatorial Roundtable, an international forum for curators and institutional leaders to discuss formative and current projects, is hosted by Steven Henry Madoff, Founding Chair of the MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
As Professor of Artistic Research (Finnish Academy of Fine Art 2010-2015) and as Dean of MaHKU Utrecht, Henk Slager has made significant contributions to the debate on the role of research in visual art. In 2004, with Jan Kaila and Gertrud Sandqvist, he initiated the European Artistic Research Network (EARN), a network that investigates the impacts of artistic research on current art education through symposia, expert meetings, and presentations. Slager has also produced and co-produced many curatorial projects, including Flash Cube (Leeum, Seoul, 2007), Translocalmotion (7th Shanghai Biennale 2008), Nameless Science (Apex Art, New York, 2009), As the Academy Turns (Collaborative project Manifesta, 2010), Tamara Kvesitadze: Any-medium-whatever (Georgian Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2011), TAR – Temporary Autonomous Research (Amsterdam Pavilion, Shanghai Biennale 2012), Doing Research (dOCUMENTA 13, 2012), Offside Effect (1st Tbilisi Triennial, 2012), Joyful Wisdom (Parallel Project, Istanbul Biennial, 2013), Modernity 3.0 (80 WSE Gallery NYU New York, 2014), Aesthetic Jam (Parallel Project Taipei Biennial) and Experimentality (1st Research Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2015), Asia Time (5th Guanzhou Triennial 2015-16), To Seminar (BAK, Utrecht, 2017), The Utopia of Access (2nd Research Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2017), Freedom, What was that all about? (7th Kuandu Biennale, Taipei 2018), Research Ecologies (3rd Research Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2019), and 9th Bucharest Biennale (2020). He published The Pleasure of Research, an overview of educational and curatorial research projects from 2007-2014, with Hatje Cantz 2015.
Launch of the new international journal, The Curatorial!
Announcing the launch of The Curatorial, a new international online journal devoted to the field of curatorial work in both practice and theory. In long-form essays, interviews, conversations, portfolios, reviews, and videos, the journal fosters interdisciplinary discussions among diverse voices at the intersection of art, culture, philosophy, and politics.
For the launch, founding Editor in Chief Steven Henry Madoff will introduce the journal, and one of its first contributors, renowned Australian art historian and theorist Terry Smith, will deliver a talk focusing on the contemporary network of institutions and structures that approximate what he calls the “visual arts exhibitionary complex,” considering its current state and how it may change under the pressures of our extraordinary moment of global upheaval.
Attendees can join via Zoom. The link will be sent one day before the event and again on the day of.
The Curatorial Roundtable: Magali Arriola (Mexico City)
The Curatorial Roundtable, an international forum for curators and institutional leaders to discuss formative and current projects, is hosted by Steven Henry Madoff, Founding Chair of the MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Magali Arriola is an independent curator, writer and researcher. She was Director of Museo Tamayo in Mexico City (2019- 2024) and KADIST Lead Curator for Latin America from 2017 to 2019. Arriola curated the Mexican Pavilion for the 58th Venice Biennial (Pablo Vargas Lugo, Acts of God, 2019). She was Chief Curator at Museo Jumex between 2011 and 2014, where she organized exhibitions of artists such as James Lee Byars (co- curated with Peter Eleey and co-produced with MoMA-PS1), Guy de Cointet, and Danh Vo, and curated shows contextualizing works from the Jumex Collection. Arriola was Chief Curator of Museo Tamayo between 2009 and 2011, where she curated exhibitions and projects with artists such as Roman Ondák, Joachim Koester, Claire Fontaine, Adrià Julia, and Julio Morales. She was visiting curator at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art in San Francisco in 2006, where she curated Prophets of Deceit.
From 1998 to 2001, Arriola was Chief Curator at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City, where she worked with a generation of artists that includes Eduardo Abaroa, Francis Alÿs, Miguel Calderon, Daniela Rossell, and Pablo Vargas Lugo. Her independent projects include Pablo Vargas Lugo, Acts of God, the Mexican Pavilion at the 58 Venice Biennial (2019); The Sweet Burnt Smell of History: The 8th Panama Biennial (2008); What once passed for a future, or The landscapes of the living dead (Art2102, Los Angeles, 2005); How to Learn to Love the Bomb and Stop Worrying about it (CANAIA, México City / Central de Arte at WTC, Guadalajara, Mexico, 2003-2004); Alibis (Mexican Cultural Institute, Paris /Witte de With, Rotterdam, 2002); Erógena (Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City / SMAK/ Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, 2000); Peter Greenaway, Painting and Artifice (Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, 1997). Arriola has extensively written for books and catalogues and has contributed to publications such as Artforum, Curare, Frieze, Mousse, Manifesta Journal, and The Exhibitionist, among others.
Curatorial Roundtable: Niels Van Tomme
The Curatorial Roundtable, an international forum for curators and institutional leaders to discuss formative and current projects, is hosted by Steven Henry Madoff, Founding Chair of the MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Niels Van Tomme is an independent curator and lecturer who works internationally at the intersection of contemporary culture and critical social awareness. He was Director and Chief Curator at Argos Centre for Audiovisual Arts in Brussels (2018-24) and De Appel in Amsterdam (2016-18), Curator at the Bucharest Biennale 7 (2014-16), Visiting Curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture in Baltimore (2011-16), and Director of Arts and Media at Provisions Library in Washington, DC (2008-11). In his projects, Van Tomme collaborates with a wide range of artists, collectives, writers, musicians, and curators. His exhibitions and programs have taken place at the Akademie der Künste (Berlin), The Kitchen (New York), Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans), Tallinn Art Hall (Tallinn), Gallery 400 (Chicago), Värmlands Museum (Karlstad), National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), and P! (New York).
His writings have appeared in The Wire, Art in America, Camera Austria, Metropolis M, Afterimage, and Art Papers. His edited volumes include Muntadas: About Academia: Activating Artefacts (2017); Aesthetic Justice: Intersecting Artistic and Moral Perspectives (2015), with Pascal Gielen; Visibility Machines: Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen (2014); and Where Do We Migrate To? (2011). He has contributed to numerous books and exhibition catalogues, such as Christine Sun Kim: Oh Me Oh My (2024) and Tony Cokes: If UR Reading This It’s 2 Late, Vol. 1-3 (2019). Van Tomme regularly writes about music and occasionally provides liner notes for vinyl records by artists such as Hieroglyphic Being and Aki Onda.
He has held teaching positions at Parsons School of Design at The New School (New York) and University of Maryland Baltimore County and has lectured at institutions such as the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Queen Mary University of London, Vassar College, University at Buffalo, the School of Visual Arts, Valand Academy of Art and Design at University of Gothenburg, and Jan Van Eyck Academy. In 2014, Van Tomme received the Vilcek Curatorial Fellowship by the Foundation for a Civil Society for his demonstrated experience and excellence in engaging with international contemporary art.
Curatorial Roundtable: Lucia Pietroiusti
The Curatorial Roundtable, an international forum for curators and institutional leaders to discuss formative and current projects, is hosted by Steven Henry Madoff, Founding Chair of the MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
How do we encounter climate breakdown? How do we negotiate the impossibly complex? If, as Amitav Ghosh suggests in The Nutmeg’s Curse, the greatest obstacle to facing planetary trouble is not a crisis of means, but one of imagination, then how do we--creative and cultural practitioners, whose lives are dedicated to the possibilities of the imagination--participate in nurturing and encouraging a renewed sense of our purpose?
In this presentation, Pietroiusti will bring stories from her own curatorial practice, from the General Ecology project (2018-ongoing) to Songs for the Changing Seasons, Vienna's first Climate Biennale (2024). To help her do so, Pietroiusti will rely upon the intelligences of many different ecologies (environmental, psychic, organizational, social, human, and more-than-human), in order to think through how these are inextricably tangled up with one another, and what directions they may point towards, for both creative and systemic practices, in a moment of profound transformation.
Lucia Pietroiusti is Head of Ecologies at Serpentine, London. As a curator, programmer, and organizational strategist, she works at the intersection of art, ecology, and systems, often outside of the exhibition space. Ecologies at Serpentine is a holistic initiative and purpose-led department aimed at embedding environmental responsibility throughout the organization’s infrastructure, operations, networks, and programming. Pietroiusti was the founder of Serpentine’s General Ecology project and the curator of Sun & Sea (Lithuanian Pavilion, 2019 Venice Biennale and ongoing tour). Together with Filipa Ramos, she is the curator of Songs for the Changing Seasons (Vienna Climate Biennale, 2024); Persones Persons (8th Biennale Gherdeïna, 2022); and The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish (research, festival, podcast and publication series). Pietroiusti is also a curator of Sites of… Practice (E-WERK Luckenwalde, 2024), Back to Earth (Serpentine, 2020-22), and Infinite Ecologies Marathon (2023-24). Recent publications include More-than-Human (with Andrés Jaque and Marina Otero Verzier) and Microhabitable (with Fernando García-Dory).
Curatorial Roundtable: Julieta González
The Curatorial Roundtable, an international forum for curators and institutional leaders to discuss formative and current projects, is hosted by Steven Henry Madoff, Founding Chair of the MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Julieta González is Head of Exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and Curator-at-Large for Modern and Contemporary Art at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo. Prior to that, she was Artistic Director at Inhotim, Brazil, Artistic Director at Museo Jumex in Mexico City, Chief Curator at the Museo Rufino Tamayo in Mexico City, and Adjunct Curator at the Bronx Museum in New York. From 2009–12, she was Associate Curator of Latin American Art at Tate Modern, London, and an independent curator. She was curator of contemporary art at the Museo Alejandro Otero (1999–2001) and Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas (1994–97 and 2001–03). González was co-curator of the 2nd Trienal Poligráfica de San Juan, Latinoamérica y el Caribe with Jens Hofmann, along with Artistic Director Adriano Pedrosa and guest curator Beatriz Santiago. She has curated and co-curated more than 60 exhibitions, including Memories of Underdevelopment, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (as part of Pacific Standard Time Latin America in LA); Franz Erhard Walther: Objects to Use/ Instruments for Processes, Museo Jumex; Lina Bo Bardi: Habitat (in partnership with MASP); GeGo: Measuring Infinity (in partnership with MASP and the Guggenheim Museum), all at Museo Jumex; Juan Downey: A Communications Utopia (2013); Rita McBride: Public Transaction (2013); Tomorrow Was Already Here (2012), all at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City; Ways of Working: The Incidental Object, Fondazione Merz, Turin (2013); Parque Industrial, Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo (2012); Juan Downey: El ojo pensante, Fundación Telefónica, Santiago, Chile (2010); Farsites, Insite San Diego/Tijuana (adjunct curator with curator Adriano Pedrosa, 2005); Etnografía modo de empleo, Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas (2003); and Demonstration Room: Ideal House (with Jesús Fuenmayor, 2000–02), Museo Alejandro Otero, Caracas. González has edited several artist books and written essays for international publications and catalogs. She holds an MA in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths, London, was a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program (1997–98), and studied architecture at the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Caracas and at the École d’Architecture Paris-Villemin in Paris.
Curatorial Roundtable: João Laia
The Curatorial Roundtable, an international forum for curators and institutional leaders to discuss formative and current projects, is hosted by Steven Henry Madoff, Founding Chair of the MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
João Laia is Artistic Director of the Department of Contemporary Art of the Municipality of Porto. Previously, he was the chief curator for exhibitions at Kiasma, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland. In 2021, together with Valentinas Klimašauskas, he curated the 14th edition of the Baltic Triennial at the CAC, Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius. Other Recent include Masks (2020) and 10000 Years Later Between Venus and Mars (2017-18), Oporto City Hall Gallery; In Free Fall (2019), CaixaForum, Barcelona; Vanishing Point (2019), Cordoaria Nacional, Lisbon; Drowning in a sea of Data (2019) and Transmissions from the Etherspace (2017), La Casa Encendida, Madrid; foreign bodies (2018), P420, Bologna; H Y P E R C O N N E C T E D (2016), MMOMA – Moscow Museum of Modern Art; and Hybridize or Disappear (2015), MNAC, National Museum of Contemporary Art in Lisbon. Laia also co-curated the 19th and 20th editions of Videobrasil (2014–18) in São Paulo. Other exhibitions, performance programs, and screenings have been held at Parque Lage (Rio de Janeiro), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Xcèntric / CCCB (Barcelona), Videoex (Zürich), Calouste Gulben, Kurzfilmtage – International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and Cell Project Space, DRAF (David Roberts Art Foundation), Delfina Foundation, South London Gallery, and Whitechapel Gallery (all in London). In 2012-13, he attended the post-graduate research program CuratorLab at Konstfack, Stockhom and in 2014 was part of the curatorial residency of Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin. He edited A Multiple Community (São Paul: SESC publishing, 2018), co-edited Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s monograph Spiral Forest (Milano: Mousse, 2018), and has published articles in Flash Art, frieze, Mousse, Spike, and Terremoto.
Info Session
Hear from the head of the MA Curatorial Practice program about every aspect of our program in the center of New York City. Our rigorous training in practice, history, and theory will prepare you for your professional work in the curatorial field. Attendees will receive an $80 application fee waiver if they apply for Summer 2025 or Fall 2025 admission. Note: This waiver will be applied to the email address used to register for this event. It is important to use the same email address consistently throughout the entire application process. Please note that we welcome individual meetings on Zoom or in-person to discuss the application and the program.
SVA wants to ensure persons with disabilities have access to this event. If you are a person with a disability who requires accommodations to access or participate in this event, please reach out to the MA Curatorial Practice department at macp@sva.edu or to SVA Disability Resources disabilityresources@sva.edu at least 7 business days prior to the event.
Register here. If you have questions regarding this event please email us at macp@sva.edu.
Application Q&A
The MA Curatorial Practice program at the School of Visual Arts gives you professional hands-on training with a faculty of renowned curators and guests from around the world to fully prepare you with the skills and knowledge you need to get hired as a professional in the field. Scholarships are available for your training in our two-year master's degree program. Have questions about your application to make it stand out? Drop into our Zoom Q&A session to chat with Chair Steven Henry Madoff, who will walk you through the application and answer all of your questions.
Attendees will receive an $80 application fee waiver if they apply for Summer 2025 or Fall 2025 admission. Note: This waiver will be applied to the email address used to register for this event. It is important to use the same email address consistently throughout the entire application process.
Please note that we welcome individual meetings on Zoom or in-person to discuss the application and the program.
SVA wants to ensure persons with disabilities have access to this event. If you are a person with a disability who requires accommodations to access or participate in this event, please reach out to the MA Curatorial Practice department at macp@sva.edu or to SVA Disability Resources disabilityresources@sva.edu at least 7 business days prior to the event.
Graduate Information Session & Open House
Join us Saturday, December 7th at the 136 W 21 Street building to learn all about the SVA Graduate Programs! This information session and open house will provide prospective students with valuable insights into the diverse array of graduate programs that the School of Visual Arts offers. During this event, attendees will have the opportunity to learn about the various programs, meet the department chairs, and receive program brochures and materials. Several programs will also provide tours of their state-of-the-art studios.
The Artist Roundtable: Minerva Cuevas
The Artists Roundtable, an international forum for leading practitioners, is hosted by Kate Fowle, faculty member of the MA Curatorial programs at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Minerva Cuevas creates research-based projects that encompass installation, street interventions, muralism, and sculpture. Her work explores notions of civilization and progress, identifies resistance implicit in everyday life, and questions our political imaginary. Through her projects, she provides insights into economic and political organizational structures in the social sphere and facilitates channels of social communication. Cuevas founded Mejor Vida Corp. in 1998 and the International Understanding Foundation (IUF) in 2016, and has collaborated on projects providing telecommunications access to indigenous communities. Her work is held in collections such as the Tate Gallery; Centre Georges Pompidou; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Museum Ludwig; Museo Jumex; and Van Abbemuseum. She is based in Mexico City.
The Artists Roundtable: Kambui Olujimi
The Artists Roundtable, an international forum for leading practitioners, is hosted by Kate Fowle, faculty member of the MA Curatorial programs at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Kambui Olujimi challenges established modes of thinking that function as inevitabilities. His practice spans sculpture, installation, photography, writing, video, and performance. By excavating the language and aesthetics of social, historical, and cultural conventions, he brings them out of the implicit, giving them gravity, weight, and shape, revealing their incongruities and illusory nature. Olujimi’s works have premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Sharjah Biennial 15, 14th Dak’Art Biennale, and Kunstmuseum Basel. His work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. He is based in New York.
The Artists Roundtable: Jesse Krimes
The Artists Roundtable, an international forum for leading practitioners, is hosted by Kate Fowle, faculty member of the MA Curatorial programs at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Jesse Krimes is a multimedia artist whose work explores societal mechanisms of power and control, with a focus on criminal and racial justice. He is the founder and director of the Center for Art & Advocacy, the first national organization dedicated to supporting justice-impacted creatives. Krimes also led a successful class-action lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase for charging formerly incarcerated individuals predatory fees after their release from prison. This fall, Krimes has exhibitions opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Jack Shainman Gallery. He won an Emmy Award for his documentary Art and Krimes by Krimes. His work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Kadist Foundation, Bunker Artspace, and the Agnes Gund Collection. He is based in Pennsylvania.
In-Person Info Session
Meet Steven Henry Madoff, Founding Chair of the MA Curatorial Practice program, in person at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he will speak with you about every aspect of our program in the center of New York City. Our rigorous training in practice, history, and theory will prepare you for your professional work in the curatorial field. Attendees will receive an $80 application fee waiver if they apply for Fall 2025 admission. Note: This waiver will be applied to the email address used to register for this event. It is important to use the same email address consistently throughout the entire application process. Please note that we welcome individual meetings on Zoom or in person to discuss the application and the program.
SVA wants to ensure persons with disabilities have access to this event. If you are a person with a disability who requires accommodations to access or participate in this event, please reach out to the MA Curatorial Practice department at macp@sva.edu or to SVA Disability Resources disabilityresources@sva.edu at least 7 business days prior to the event.
Event location: Museum of Fine Arts Boston, 465 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA 02115
Register here. If you have questions regarding this event, please email us at macp@sva.edu.
Info Session
Hear from the head of the MA Curatorial Practice program about every aspect of our program in the center of New York City. Our rigorous training in practice, history, and theory will prepare you for your professional work in the curatorial field. Attendees will receive an $80 application fee waiver if they apply for Summer 2025 or Fall 2025 admission. Note: This waiver will be applied to the email address used to register for this event. It is important to use the same email address consistently throughout the entire application process. Please note that we welcome individual meetings on Zoom or in-person to discuss the application and the program.
SVA wants to ensure persons with disabilities have access to this event. If you are a person with a disability who requires accommodations to access or participate in this event, please reach out to the MA Curatorial Practice department at macp@sva.edu or to SVA Disability Resources disabilityresources@sva.edu at least 7 business days prior to the event.
Register here. If you have questions regarding this event please email us at macp@sva.edu.