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Amplify’s next Alternate Currents panel discussion, From the Margins to the Center: Inclusive Curatorial Practices, brings together Natalie Bell, Curator at The MIT List Visual Arts Center; Mary Lawson, Artist and Organizer; and Jared Ledesma, Senior Curator at the Akron Art Museum for a candid conversation about inclusive curatorial practices that center making projects, performances, and exhibitions with community instead of about.
Together with moderator Jared Packard, Exhibitions Manager at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, panelists will examine methodological shifts in an ever expanding field, question barriers institutional structures pose to working inclusively, and talk through what adopting more inclusive curatorial practices might mean for arts organizations committed to racial equity and justice.
Join the conversation on Thursday, August 19th at 7pm by registering HERE. You will receive a confirmation email with a link to join the discussion on Zoom after registering. And don’t forget to visit the Alternate Currents blog before the discussion for more on the topic.
Alternate Currents opens space for conversation, ideation, and action around national and international discussions in the arts that have a profound impact at the local level. Alternate Currents exists both on- and off-line in the form of a dedicated online resource, conversation series, and working group.
Free and open to all. Virtual programming is presented with the support of the Nebraska Arts Council and the Nebraska Cultural Endowment.
About the Panelists:
Natalie Bell is Curator at The MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts where she thinks and works with communities committed to experimentation and risk-taking in the arts. Before joining the List Center’s staff, Natalie worked as an assistant and associate curator at the New Museum in New York. During her tenure there, she curated solo exhibitions by Anna Boghiguian, Marguerite Humeau, Hiwa K, and Lubaina Himid and co-curated large-scale group exhibitions including Here and Elsewhere (2014), The Keeper (2016), Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon (2017), and, most recently, The Warmth of Other Suns (2019). Prior to her work at the New Museum, Natalie was assistant curator for The Encyclopedic Palace, the International Exhibition of the 55th Venice Biennale (2013).
Mary Lawson is a musician, organizer, and advocate who most recently worked as the Artist and Program Support Manager at the Union for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Nebraska. While at the Union, Mary curated Uplift & Elevate (2020-21), a series of virtual performances and rotating exhibitions installed in the gallery’s street-facing windows that celebrate the work of traditionally underrepresented artists. Mary, who also performs under the moniker ‘Mesonjixx,’ belongs to two diasporas of two hemispheres. Her father is a Black Visionary born and raised in Ozark, Alabama and her mother is a South Pasifika Islander-Oracle from Honolulu, Hawaii. Her work as an organizer and artist is central to her identity as a Black-femme woman, with Native and Indigenous South Pasifika roots, who calls the plains of Amerika her home.
Jared Ledesma joined the Akron Art Museum as senior curator in July 2021. Prior to Akron, Ledesma was associate curator at the Des Moines Art Center, where he organized more than a dozen exhibitions. This includes Queer Abstraction, which earned a commendation from the 2019 Sotheby’s Prize jury and the 2020 SECAC Award for Outstanding Exhibition and Catalog of Contemporary Materials. Other exhibitions Ledesma has organized include Iowa Artists 2021: Olivia Valentine, Hedda Sterne: Imagination and Machine, Jeffrey Gibson: I Was Here, The Art Students League of New York, and I, too, am America (2017). Before working at the Des Moines Art Center, Ledesma was curatorial assistant in the department of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). Ledesma is originally from the San Francisco Bay Area and holds both a BA and MA in art history, with a focus in queer art.
About the Moderator:
Jared Packard is an artist and curator based in Omaha, NE where he is the Exhibitions Manager at The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art. Packard completed his BA at Clark University and his MFA at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has curated the NEA-funded unLOCK: Merging Art and Industry, Lockport, IL; an urban curatorial experiment, Stumble Chicago; the nationally traveling exhibition, ReTooled: Highlights from the Hechinger Collection; and (Re)Flex Space, Sullivan Galleries, Chicago, IL. He has shown his work at ADDS DONNA, Chicago, IL; Baltimore Gallery, Detroit, MI; Sullivan Galleries, Chicago, IL; Centre International d’Art Contemporain, Pont-Aven, France; Hillyer Art Space, Washington, D.C.; Shiltkamp Gallery, Worcester, MA.