MA Curatorial Practice program and year-end exhibitions: What Happens Here

The School of Visual Art’s MA Curatorial Practice program focuses on intensive hands-on training. Our faculty members are prominent curators teaching what they do, from Kate Fowle, chief curator of Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow to Roddy Schrock, director of Eyebeam; Tim Griffin, director and chief curator of The Kitchen; Laurel Ptak, director of Art in General; Sara Reisman, artistic director, of the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation; Charles Renfro, partner of Diller Scofidio + Renfro; Mia Locks, co-curator of the 2017 Whitney Biennial; Brian Kuan Wood, founding editor of e-flux journal; and many more. Our faculty at large includes some of the most distinguished curators and curatorial thinkers in the world—among them, Clémentine Deliss, Hou Hanru, Chus Martinez, Terry Smith, Sofía Hernandez Chong Cuy, and Mick Wilson.

Our students are subsidized to produce at least three exhibitions or other curatorial projects during their two years in the program (and these are often added to with exhibitions and projects they do independently both locally and internationally). They have at least one internship under a distinguished mentor at a major institution in Asia, Latin America, Europe, or the United States. Our internships have led to further project work and to jobs at these international institutions. In fact, we are pleased to announce the appointment of our recent graduate, Jacqueline Kok, who has been hired by her mentor, Nicolas Bourriaud, at La Panacée Moco Center for Contemporary Art in Montpellier. Special events, such as the panel discussion about immortality recently held with the participation of Anton Vidokle, artist and co-founder of e-flux, and Xiaoyu Weng, associate curator at the Solomon R. Guggenhim Museum, enrich our program. To culminate their seminars and workshops concerning various forms of curating, exhibition history, theory, writing, weekly visits with curators from around the world, and professional practicums, our students mount major year-end exhibitions and symposia in large industrial spaces in Brooklyn.

We have just held “Double Disappearance: A symposium about the Undocumented Memorial of 9/11,” curated by Andrea Valencia Aranda, that brought distinguished panelists to discuss the exclusion of undocumented immigrants from the National September 11 Memorial, while interrogating the politics of memorial culture and the complex identity of migrants.

Now, we are thrilled to announce the exhibitions that culminate our students’ work in the spring of 2019.

The opening is free and open to the public. The exhibitions will be on view until May 8 by appointment.

Exhibitions
Curated by John Michael Elammar, What Happens Here Stays with Us is a one-night-only event that brings artists, performers, and works together to experiment with the form of party-as-platform as a device to transform and transfer knowledge between bodies and environments.

Jesse Bandler Firestone’s Haunted and Whole exhibition historicizes late queer artists and their communities lost during the AIDS crisis by tracing and revealing linkages between artists from the past and artists today.

Idioglossia, curated by Xinyi Ren, questions the unprecedented ease of both expression and its censorship in the information age, through the lens of private languages as well as spontaneous or deliberate deviations from existing language systems.

Bringing together several Colombian artists who offer pathways to understand a half-century of devastating armed conflict in their country, María Alejandra Sáenz’s exhibition, Geographical Memories, considers the impact of war on nature as a living body that reacts, records, and remembers.

Curated by Michele Thursz, “[I]n the image of…” explores communication technology’s increasing abstraction of language, space, and culture by presenting artworks as worlds within worlds: portals to other spaces and experiences.

Please join us to celebrate the exhibitions on April 18. For further information about the program and to apply, please visit macp.sva.edu.