CURATORIAL
***
Liveable Worlds, 2023.
By most any measure, the world is becoming less liveable. Climate breakdown undermines ecosystems and ways of living, paralleling crises in social life. These disruptions reflect long-standing patterns rooted in the inseparability of settler-colonialism, anti-blackness, and environmental destruction. Liveable Worlds focuses on how artists, designers, and community members have long seen environmental disruption as a moment to reimagine and rebuild. The exhibition takes as its point of departure the notion that there are multiple “worlds”— material, psychic, and communal—and opens space to envision new forms of visualization, survival, collaboration, and community. Co-curated with Sabine Malcolm. Institute for Contemporary Art at MECA&D. (above, Liveable Worlds installation view: Joel Tsui)
ARTISTS: Futurefarmers, Sky Hopinka, Athena LaTocha, Patte Loper, Mary Mattingly, Pamela Moulton/Posey, Oscar Santillán, Cauleen Smith, Will Wilson
***
Journey Around My Room, 2023
Taking a cue from Xavier De Maistre’s detailed 1794 treatise, Journey Around My Room proposes that the act of articulating one’s space – be it home or studio, real or invented – is not only an act of attention to the everyday and the construction of place, but also an act of self-construction. The exhibition presents the work of seven artists who work in photography, painting, and textile to explore the intimacy of interior spaces. Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA&D.
ARTISTS: Gideon Bok, Oona Brangam-Snell, Henri Paul Broyard, Anne Buckwalter, Merik Goma, and Lori Nix/Kathleen Gerber
***
Sympathy for the translator, 2022
An exhibition investigating the politics of translation. Sympathy for the translator brings together an array of practices that touch upon language making, memory, and notions of intimacy, as well as issues of visibility. Worked with curator Daisy Desrosiers, Director and Chief Curator of the Gund Gallery, to realize exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA&D.
ARTISTS: Jesse Chun, Marie-Michelle Deschamps, Renée Green, Bouchra Khalili, Christine Sun Kim, Tony Lewis, Kathleen Ritter, Caroline Monnet, Cherrie Yu
***
A Fresh Greeting is Heard, 2022
Highlights the work of four artists who navigate realms between abstraction and figuration to tease out the disquiet and enchantment found in wild spaces, the magic of transformation, the tendency to see meaningful imagery in ambiguous forms, and the agency of natural places as vibrant actors in our collective imagination. Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA&D.
ARTISTS: Leon Benn, Lauren Mabry, Allison Schulnik, and Hannah Secord Wade
***
CONJURING: 25 Years at the ICA, 2022
Celebrating the artists and curators who have come through the ICA since its beginning in 1997. Interviews with Jennifer Gross, Mark Bessire, Daniel Fuller and others. Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA&D.
***
Monitor: Surveillance, Data, and the New Panoptic, 2021
Exhibition of work by eight artists who explore the ways in which our lives are being influenced and determined by visible and invisible actions of oversight. Developed in conversation with Brendan McQuade and accompanied by a film series programmed by Sophie Hamacher. Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA.
ARTISTS: Christopher Gregory-Rivera, Margaret Laurena Kemp + Abram Stern, Yazan Khalili, Kapwani Kiwanga, Ann Messner, Orphan Drift, Trevor Paglen
***
DOUBLE TROUBLE, 2021
Exhibition of work by five artists working in painting, sculpture, photography, and installation. These artworks reflect on the idea of the double - as mirror, repetition, second skin, or iteration - in ways that wrestle with representation and self definition. Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA.
ARTISTS: Sonia Almeida, Bianca Beck, Sascha Braunig, Lucy Kim, Joiri Minaya
***
Parallax/Geography, 2021
Four artists whose use of the photographic medium negotiates experimental processes and conceptually driven structures, revisiting the classic materials of photography: time, light, space, and substrate. Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA.
ARTISTS: Elizabeth Atterbury, Tad Beck, Sage Lewis, Amanda Marchand
***
Tory Fair: Portable Window, 2021
Premiere of Tory Fair's recent video, photography, and sculpture inspired by the work of pioneering feminist Mary Miss that frame new perspectives in collaboration and landscape. Organized in collaboration with Nikki Rayburn for the Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA.
***
ACOUSTIC RESONANCE, 2020
Sound travels through the air and our public spaces, and resonates in our bodies. It carries across neighborhoods and through fences - even at a distance it communicates our longings for each other and our desires for change. ACOUSTIC RESONANCE, an exhibition of sound art, foregrounds the power of sound to connect and transform us. Developed in conversation with Steve Drown. Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA.
ARTISTS: Ryan Adams, Raven Chacon, John Fireman, Matt Joynt + Josh Rios + Anthony Romero, Angel Nevarez + Valerie Tevere, Andrea Ray, Julianne Swartz, Audra Wolowiec
***
Some Things We Can Do Together: Megan and Murray McMillan, 2020
Constructing complex, architectural sets that become stages for video and photography, the McMillans create works that offer a window into seemingly impossible situations and magical, transportive journeys.
Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA.
***
PLATFORM PROJECTS/WALKS: ecologies of the local, 2020
An exhibition, public artist led walks, talks, and community discussions presented over seven weeks in the summer/autumn of 2020 throughout greater Portland inviting audience to become viewer-participants in reflections, experiences, and conversations regarding our local ecologies and climate-related changes. Presented with Speedwell projects.
ARTISTS: Kim Beck, Susan Bickford with Rachel Alexandrou, Tracey Cockrell, Viviane Le Courtois, Elaine K. Ng, In Kinship Fellowship, Mihku Paul, Jan Piribeck, Julie Poitras Santos with Beverly Johnson, Asata Radcliffe, Todd Shalom, Brian Smith, Addy Smith-Reiman, John Sundling
Catalogue: PLATFORM PROJECTS/WALKS 2020: ecologies of the local
***
Making Migration Visible: Traces, Tracks & Pathways, 2018
Migration, mobility, and displacement is the story of our era. Fears about human mobility and border crossers are reshaping politics; climate change promises to cause massive displacements; global leaders are scrambling to reconfigure and secure borders; people everywhere are moving to find safe lives for their families. The artists in Making Migration Visible: Traces, Tracks & Pathways challenge the idea that migration is an exception or a crisis, showing viewers that migration is now the norm, inscribed in our landscapes, memories, bodies, and imaginings.
ARTISTS: Ahmed Alsoudani, Caroline Bergvall, Edwige Charlot, Jason De León + Michael Wells + Lucy Cahill, Eric Gottesman, Mohamad Hafez, Romuald Hazoumè, Ranu Mukherjee, Daniel Quintanilla + United YES, María Patricia Tinajero, and Yu-Wen Wu.
In addition to the exhibition in the Institute of Contemporary Art at MECA, MAKING MIGRATION VISIBLE is a state-wide initiative featuring events by more than seventy partner organizations offering parallel exhibitions, film screenings, performances, lectures, community dinners, poetry, and more. The initiative also included a day-long symposium, ART+POLITICS, inviting leaders in the art community to speak on the role of art in cultivating spaces for civic engagement on controversial topics and sparking social change.
Co-curated with Catherine Besteman for the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art. The exhibition was made possible in part thanks to the support of private donors, Colby College, the Lunder Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
***
PLATFORM PROJECTS/WALKS, 2016
A public project that engages local community in a series cross-disciplinary conversations and activities around the idea of walking as creative provocation, practice and product. The initial two-week project took place in summer 2016, in Portland, ME.
ARTISTS: Amy Stacey Curtis, Jane Burdick, Annika Earley, Nina Earley, Angela Elsworth, Megan Grumbling, Adriane Herman, Rachel Katz, Barbara Lounder, Cathleen Miller, Mitchell Rasor, Gordon Sasaki, Katarina Weslien, Deborah Wing-Sproul
Read more about the project in this article by author Jenna Crowder in The Chart, "The Ambling Aesthetics of Platform Projects/Walks"
Initial support for PLATFORM PROJECTS/WALKS 2016 was provided by SPACE Gallery through the Kindling Fund
***
A THICKENING RHYTHM, 2012
A project exploring the layering of meaning through the accretion of actions and time, at Coleman Burke Gallery, in Brunswick, Maine.
The artists in A Thickening Rhythm unravel old narratives, build gardens and structures, lace together the world in a fragile web of awareness and desire, and create new territories. Contrasting the speed of our daily lives, all of these works ask of the maker and the viewer to be quiet for a time - a necessary gesture of stillness, a listening - before extending our reach into space, increasing new and multiple networks and connections. We create moments of pause and repetition, thickening places and places of stillness where methodically we build new land -- land we may employ like a raft as we proceed, break free, into new spaces, distant horizons, navigating the world.
ARTISTS: Lauren Fensterstock, Julie Poitras Santos, Carrie Scanga, Ling-Wen Tsai, Deborah Wing-Sproul