CURATOR CHAT

What event (gallery show, museum exhibit, etc.) in the next few months are you looking forward to, and why?

This is a particularly exciting time for exhibitions of American Indian arts. Six Indigenous artists are included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, Minneapolis Institute of Art is opening a major traveling exhibition on Indigenous women, and the T.C. Cannon and Jeffrey Gibson exhibitions, as well as Crystal Bridges’ Art For a New Understanding, are soon coming to a close. I’m particularly excited to see the installation of two monumental paintings by Kent Monkman at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, debuting in December of 2019. Native artists are reaching new audiences and their work is now included in spaces that overlooked them, historically.

What are you reading?

Recent books I’ve read include Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI and Tommy Orange’s novel, There There. A new book that just debuted that is next up for me is Sabrina & Corina, a collection of stories by Kali Fajardo-anstine.

Interesting exhibit, gallery opening or work of art you’ve seen recently.

While on a recent visit to the Museum of Vancouver, I came across

Haida Now—a collaborative exhibition of Haida arts by a Haida curator, Kwiaahwah Jones. The deep levels of community knowledge, engagement and sensitivity demonstrated in the approach was inspiring.

What are you researching at the moment?

I just completed a deep dive into Oscar Howe’s work for an essay on Howe as a storyteller and keeper of Indigenous knowledge for an upcoming retrospective catalogue by the National Museum of the American Indian. His archive at University of South Dakota in Vermillion is an incredible, and largely untapped, resource. Now I’m switching gears to focus on collection-based research for Denver Art Museum’s upcoming permanent gallery reinstallation.

What is your dream exhibit to curate? Or see someone else curate?

I need to remain intentionally vague here, but I have just started the development of my dream exhibitions. Yes, plural. One is a two-artist contemporary art exhibition. Another is a major single artist show. And another is a massive show that will include work by artists from over a period of at least 200 years. Keep an eye on Denver in the coming years as these exhibitions come to life.