Common Ground | Curatorial Activism

For our third installment of Common Ground, artist Patricia Cronin, and curators Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Nur Sobers-Khan, and Jasmine Wahi join host Maura Reilly for a conversation on Curatorial Activism. We close with a poetry reading by Camilo Roldán.

Learn more about this event on our website: https://brooklynrail.org/event....s/2020/09/17/curator

At the start of quarantine, the Brooklyn Rail asked how might we stay connected to each other in a time of self-isolation? Now we ask: How can we stay involved and engaged in upholding our civic responsibility to one another across communities? How can we deploy this community we have built through the New Social Environment—through hundreds of conversations and meals shared over the past six months—to mobilize daily action for grassroots movements, social justice and equity projects, and for the political good of our most marginalized communities across the nation? Common Ground will be taking over the New Social Environment Thursday 1pm slot—beginning immediately and continuing up to the presidential election—and will convene weekly on Thursdays at 1pm Eastern from Sept 3rd through Nov 5th.

Maura Reilly is a curator 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). Reilly is the Founding Curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, where she developed and launched the first exhibition and public programming space in the USA devoted entirely to feminist art. In 2015, Reilly was named one of the Top 50 most influential people in the art world by Art & Auction, in recognition of her advocacy for women artists. She is an Editor-at-Large for the Brooklyn Rail. Reilly is Associate Professor of Art History and Museum Studies at Arizona State University.

Patricia Cronin is an interdisciplinary conceptual artist whose work has been exhibited widely in the U.S. and internationally, including Shrine For Girls at the 56th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy and traveled to The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY and the LAB Gallery, Dublin, Ireland. Other solo exhibitions were presented at the Capitoline Museum’s Centrale Montemartini Museum, Rome, Italy; Newcomb Art Museum, New Orleans, LA; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; and Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, FL. She is Professor of Art at Brooklyn College of The City University of New York.

Cecilia Fajardo-Hill is a British-Venezuelan art historian and curator with a specialization in modern and contemporary Latin American art. She is currently based in Southern California and New York. Fajardo-Hill holds a PhD in art history from the University of Essex, England, and an MA in 20th-century art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, England. She is Visiting Scholar at the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA.

Nur Sobers-Khan is the Lead Curator for South Asian Collections at the British Library, London, where she is responsible for curating a collection of books and manuscripts on the history of Islam in South Asia. Her current work focuses on dismantling the structures of colonial violence embedded in the curation and exhibition of these collections. Most recently she has been involved in the efforts of the library’s Decolonising Working Group. She is currently Principle Investigator of the AHRC-funded research and digitization project Two Centuries of Indian Print. She completed her BA and PhD in Oriental Studies at the University of Cambridge.

Jasmine Wahi is the Holly Block Social Justice Curator at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the Founder + Co-Director of Project for Empty Space, a Newark, NJ based non profit organization that supports artists who are interested in social discourse and activism. Wahi is a Visiting Critic at Yale University, and a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts: MFA Fine Arts department. Jasmine Wahi received her Masters in Art History from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. She lives with her chihuahua mutt, Momo, in Brooklyn.

Camilo Roldán is a Colombian-American poet and translator. His first full-length book of poems, Dropout, was published in 2019 and a translation of María Paz Guerrero’s book, God is a Bitch Too (Dios también es una perra), is forthcoming from UDP in December 2020.