ASU and The Brooklyn Rail: Curatorial Activism/Queer Curating, School of Art Visiting Artist Lecture Series
Curatorial Activism/Queer Curating: Maura Reilly and Friends. A conversation on queer curatorial practices featuring legendary curators Juan Vicente Aliaga, Clare Barlow, Birgit Bosold, Dan Cameron, Amelia Jones and Jonathan Katz in conversation with Maura Reilly. We’ll conclude with a poetry reading from multidisciplinary artist and poet Mimi Tempestt.
Juan Vicente Aliaga — University Reader in Modern and Contemporary Art Theory, Juan Vicente Aliaga is associated with the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Polytechnic University of Valencia. His research is centred around feminist, gender and queer studies with special attention to cultural, artistic and political representations of sexual diversity.
Dr. Clare Barlow is a London-based curator. Her most recent project is Being Human, a new permanent gallery curated for the Wellcome Collection, London, which opened September 2019 and was shortlisted for the Arts + Heritage awards for “Best Permanent Exhibition of the Year”.
Birgit Bosold — Since 2006 Birgit Bosold has been a member of the board of the Schwules Museum in Berlin. In this function, she is responsible for funding and finances and was a key participant in the museum’s strategic reorientation. She was the project leader and co-curator of the major exhibition Homosexualität___en, which was initiated by the Schwules Museum and realized in cooperation with the Deutsches Historisches Museum.
Dan Cameron is a New York-based curator, art writer and educator whose professional career began with his 1982 New Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition, Extended Sensibilities: Homosexual Presence in Contemporary Art, the first museum effort in the U.S. to examine gay and lesbian identity in art.
Amelia Jones is Robert A. Day Professor and Vice Dean of Academics and Research in Roski School of Art & Design at the University of Southern California. Amelia is the curator of the critically acclaimed exhibition Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s ‘Dinner Party’ in Feminist Art History, at the Hammer Museum at UCLA, in 1996, and organized the exhibition Material Traces: Time and the Gesture in Contemporary Art at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Gallery in Montréal in 2013.
Jonathan D. Katz is perhaps the founding figure in queer art history, responsible for the very first queer scholarship on a number of artists beginning in the early 1990s. Recent projects include a study of the international influence of Herbert Marcuse’s writing on the visual arts from the 1950s to the 1970s, a new reading of the cultural wars in the era of AIDS and contemporary resonances of that conflict, a project envisioning supplanting the predominantly binary understanding of sexuality with a trans perspective, and new work on queer Latinx artists in periods of dictatorship.
Maura Reilly is a curator and arts writer who has organized dozens of exhibitions internationally with a specific focus on marginalized artists. She has written extensively on global contemporary art and curatorial practice, including, most recently Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating (Thames & Hudson, 2018), which was named a “Top 10 Best Art Book of 2018” by the New York Times.