The master’s degree program in Curatorial Practice (MACP) at the School of Visual Arts is pleased to announce its special events for fall 2021. All will be held online and are free to the public. Please click on the titles of the events to register on Eventbrite and receive a link to the Zoom meeting by email shortly before the event.
Wednesday, September 15, 12–1pm ET on Zoom
Between US Race Theory and French Republican Ideals: Nadia Yala Kisukidi and Claire Tancons in Conversation
Distinguished curator Claire Tancons, now living in Paris, considers how France’s foundational Republican ideals and contemporary multicultural experience rub against each other through the lens of American race theory and identity politics—recently demonized by factions within France’s higher education system and at the upper levels of the Republic itself. She is joined by French philosopher Nadia Yala Kisukidi, curator of the 2021 Yango Biennale in Kinshasa, who has examined the colonial implications of “blackness” in France and Europe. What can the US and France learn from each other about the challenges of race and identity today?
Tuesday, October 5, 8–9pm ET on Zoom
Other Art Worlds Completely: Freya Chou and Alexander Lau in Conversation
The globalized art world has had a homogenizing effect on artists and exhibitions, yet also presents novel techniques for discovering artistic approaches that challenge what art can and should be. Working between East Asian and Euro-American institutions, exhibitions, and artist studios, Alexander Lau, director of Empty Gallery in Hong Kong, and Freya Chou, who has served on the curatorial teams of the Taipei and Shanghai Biennials, as well as the upcoming 58th Carnegie International and the 2022 Venice Biennale, join MACP Director of Research Brian Kuan Wood to discuss how artists and curators can avoid homogenization, finding unexpected ways to make and present art today.
Wednesday, October 20, 2–3pm ET on Zoom
The Year of Uncertainty at Queens Museum
This year, the Queens Museum embraces the “intolerable uncertainty” of our time by embarking on a process of institutional self-exploration, while strengthening connections between the museum and its communities to create new possibilities for culture, kinship, and mutual support. Join Queens Museum President and Executive Director Sally Tallant, Public Programs Manager Catherine Grau, Director of Education Kimaada Le Gendre, and artist-in-residence Julian Louis Phillips to explore how a new kind of institution can embrace the unknown.
Wednesday, November 17, 12-1pm ET on Zoom
Natural and Cultural Heritage of the Future, Not the Past: The Natural History Museum
The Natural History Museum is a traveling pop-up museum that also organizes exhibitions inside museums, motivating them to act not as shrines to a civilization in decline, but as agents of change. Working with artists, activists, Native Nations, scientists, and museum professionals, the museum inquires into what we see, how we see, and what remains excluded. Join members of Not An Alternative—a collective of artists, activists, cultural organizers, and critical theorists that initiated The Natural History Museum—to ask how new interpretations of cultural and environmental heritage can arise from connecting climate justice and land rights movements to the history of museums and the legacy of colonialism.
Thursday, December 2, 8-9pm ET on Zoom
Book launch for Terry Smith’s Curating the Complex And the Open Strike
MACP chair Steven Henry Madoff, editor of a new essay series from Sternberg Press, speaks with eminent art historian, author, and artist Terry Smith, who has written the inaugural essay, “Curating the Complex And the Open Strike.” Smith offers a visionary and surgically precise analysis that maps what Smith calls the “visual arts exhibitionary complex,” profiling the vast institutional and quasi-institutional framework for contemporary art that sprawls the globe.
MACP is one of the world’s leading master’s programs in curating, bringing together internationally renowned curators and experts to train the next generation of leaders in the field. MACP supports equity and social justice of every kind. To find out more about the program, please click here.
