Summer Curator Residencies
Summer, 2018
Griffin Art Projects is collaborating with PortLiving to facilitate an international Curatorial Residence Program. The project is an innovative partnership which brings career support and cultural development opportunities to local artists, promoting the growth of international relationships by bringing established curators to Vancouver so they may know, engage with and enrich our community.
By inviting distinguished professionals from respected institutions across North America for week-long work trips in our residence, we will be providing a new platform for broadening the reach of local artists and their ideas. In building ties to an international network, the program will actively develop a more sustainable career for working artists’ lives. Through working with PortLiving to build these local creatives profile, the program will address the three key points which enable this growth: access, engagement and opportunity.
Visting curators include, Amy Adams, Adams and Ollman, Portland, Kari Cwynar, C Magazine, Toronto, Bridget Finn, Managing Director, Reyes Projects, Detroit, Sophie Hackett, Associate Curator of Photography, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Sara Krajewski, Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Portland Art Museum , Catharina Manchanda, Jon and Mary Shirley Curator of Contemporary Art, Seattle Art Museum, Jennifer Papararo, Director, Plug In, ICA, Winnipeg, Manuela Paz, Independent Curators International, NYC, and Erin Somerville, Deputy Director and Curator, White Columns, New York.
Griffin Art Projects would like to thank PortLiving, the Michael and Inna O’Brian Family Foundation, Christina Hirakawa and Brigitte and Henning Freybe for supporting this innovative program.
Catharina Manchanda is the Jon and Mary Shirley Curator of Contemporary Art at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM). Joining SAM in 2011, Manchanda formerly served as the Senior Curator of Exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, where she curated exhibitions such as Cyprien Gaillard: Disquieting Landscapes; Harry Shearer: The Silent Echo Chamber; and Catch Air: Robin Rhode. Prior to tenure at the Wexner, she worked in curatorial positions at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Her publications include Figuring History: Robert Colescott, Kerry James Marshall, Mickalene Thomas, “Probing History and Its Displays: A Conceptual Intervention,” “The Architecture of Images: Photographic Perspectives,” and “Object Lessons: Richter’s Nine Objects.” Originally from Stuttgart, Germany, Manchanda has a B.A. in Art History, English and German from the University of Stuttgart in Germany (1990), an M.A. in Art History from the University of Delaware (1993) and a Ph.D. in Art History from the City University of New York (2005), where she wrote her dissertation on photography in 1960’s and 70’s German art.
Sara Krajewski serves as the Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Portland Art Museum, where she is responsible for the Museum’s growing contemporary art collection, exhibitions and programming. Previously, Krajewski was the director of the Institute of Visual Arts (INOVA) galleries at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she had served since 2012. During her tenure at INOVA, Krajewski expanded the gallery’s focus on interdisciplinary art forms, film and video installation, and performance, and organized group exhibitions exploring topical issues such as environmental change. She emphasized connecting the gallery to the University community, facilitating the creation of new works across disciplines and placing artistic research into broader dialogues of social and cultural importance. Before INOVA, Krajewski was curator at the University of Washington’s Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, and held curatorial positions at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art and the Harvard University Art Museum. Over the course of eight years at the Henry Art Gallery, Krajewski organized nearly 40 exhibitions of contemporary art and photography that reflected her strong ties to the artistic community of the Pacific Northwest and Vancouver, B.C. She earned her undergraduate degree in Art History at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and her master’s degree in Art History at Williams College, with her writing appearing in Art on Paper, ArtUS, and other publications. Her research on transdisciplinary art and performance has been supported by an Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Curatorial Fellowship.
Jenifer Papararo is the Executive Director of Plug Institute of Contemporary Art, Winnipeg, previously working as the Curator at the Contemporary Art Gallery (CAG), Vancouver, and the Program Director at Mercer Union, Toronto. Papararo has 15 years of experience within the field of contemporary art as a curator, writer, institutional director and member of a service-oriented curatorial and artist collective, Instant Coffee. She has curated numerous solo exhibitions, including Angie Keefer and Skeena Reece and and exhibiting the work of Fred Sandback. Her most recent curated groups exhibitions for Plug In ICA include: The State, examining the anxiety of nation-states; Entering the Landscape, featuring 21 artists who place the female or queer body in the landscape; Superimposition: Sculpture and Image, a collapsing of form and image; and Further Than I Can Throw A Stone, an exhibition of film and video work. At the CAG, she worked with artists including Mike Nelson, Frances Stark, Monika Sosnowska, Nairy Bagramian, Raymond Boisjoly, and Rodney Graham. As Director of Programming and Publishing at Mercer Union, Toronto, she curated Mark Leckey’s Soundsystem, credited as the British artist’s first solo exhibition in Canada. As a founding member of Instant Coffee, Papararo has exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Toronto Sculpture Garden, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, and other national and international locales. Her writing has appeared in Canadian Art, Mix Magazine, C Magazine, and Lolaas well as numerous exhibition essays and catalogue contributions.
Sophie Hackett is the Curator, Photography, at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), Toronto and adjunct faculty in Ryerson University’s master’s program in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management. Hackett joined the AGO in 2006 as Assistant Curator, Photography. Among many accomplishments, Hackett has played a key role in acquiring major bodies of work, including the Garry Winogrand, Malcolmson and Casa Susanna collections, and developed a powerful series of exhibitions that have increased the reach of the AGO’s photography program, including What It Means To Be Seen: Photography and Queer Visibility and Fan the Flames: Queer Positions in Photography in 2014; and Outsiders: American Photography and Film, 1950s-1980sin 2016. Hackett’s other curatorial projects during her tenure at the AGO include Barbara Kruger: Untitled (It) (2010); Songs of the Future: Canadian Industrial Photographs, 1858 to Today (2011); Max Dean: Album, A Public Project (2012); and Introducing Suzy Lake (2014). In 2017, Hackett was the lead juror for the Aimia | AGO Photography Prize, a role she also held in 2010, 2012 and 2014. She launched the AGO’s new galleries for the Photography Collection in April 2017. Hackett was a recent 2017 Fellow with the Center for Curatorial Leadership, completing a residency at the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, University of California, Berkeley. She continues to write for art magazines, international journals and artist monographs. Her recent publications include “Queer Looking: Joan E. Biren’s Slide Shows” in Aperture (Spring 2015) and “Encounters in the Museum: The Experience of Photographic Objects” in the edited volume The “Public” Life of Photographs (Ryerson Image Centre and MIT Press, 2016). Hackett is the co-curator of the exhibition Anthropocene, the latest project by collaborators Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier, opening at the AGO and the National Gallery of Canada in September 2018.
Manuela Paz is director of Development and Strategic Planning at Independent Curators International (ICI) in New York, an organization that produces exhibitions, events, publication, and research centering on the role of the curator as a contextualizing and infrastructural force for contemporary art. Prior to her role at ICI, Paz worked with the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) as the group’s membership and special program’s director, where she developed year-round programming, including collection tours, talks, dinners, studio visits, and gallery tours. Before NADA, Paz worked for The Armory Show in New York, beginning as an assistant and working her way up to Director of VIP Relations over the course of eight years. In 2015, Paz co-founded Embajada, a project space serving as a platform for international dialogue located in the Hato Rey neighborhood of San Juan, Puerto Rico with her partner, artist Christopher Rivera. Paz has a proven track record in shaping meaningful experiences for today’s leading arts patrons and collectors, while providing emerging and established galleries with a platform for exposure and growth. She holds a BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York City (2003).
Amy Adams owns and runs Adams and Ollman, an art gallery in downtown Portland specializing in work by 20th century self-taught American artists and contemporary artists whose practices reflect an intuitive influence. Adams began her career in Philadelphia as an artist, becoming involved with the local nonprofit Vox Populi, an artist-run collective and space that supports the work of under-represented artists with monthly exhibitions, gallery talks, performances and lectures. Adams eventually served as Director of Vox Populi and was involved in various programming, community outreach, and exhibition planning before moving to Portland to found her own gallery space. At Adams and Ollman, her exhibitions often juxtapose the work of contemporary artists with self-taught, anonymous, and folk artists, creating a dialogue between diverse artistic practices and leveling the distinction between contemporary and “outsider” art. Working with artists as diverse as Jonathan Berger, Ellen Lesperance, and Vaginal Davis, Adams focuses her curatorial efforts on investigating and developing radically alternative readings of art and art history.
Bridget Finn is Managing Director of Reyes Projects, a gallery in Birmingham, Michigan, which aims to engage with the local art’s community as well as artists from outside the area. Before joining the Reyes Projects team, Finn worked with the Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery in Chelsea, NY as director of contemporary programming, where she was responsible for gallery programming, handling art sales, and liaising with artists. Finn served as Associate Director of Strategic Planning & ICI Projects at Independent Curators International (ICI), where she is now on the Board of Trustees. In 2008, alongside Bridget Donahue and Erin Somerville, Finn co-founded Cleopatra’s in 2008, a 10 year curatorial project and gallery project space residing in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Previously, she worked at the Anton Kern Gallery, where she liaised with and supported gallery artists. Finn received her BFA from The College for Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan.
Kari Cwynar is a curator, writer and editor living in Toronto, Canada. She is Curator at Evergreen Brick Works, where she is developing a program of temporary, site-specific public art projects in Toronto’s Don River Valley. The program launched in 2017 with new works by Duane Linklater, Maria Hassabi and Life of a Craphead. Cwynar is also currently Editorial Director of C Magazine, where she has been since 2015.
In 2014, Cwynar and artist Kara Hamilton co-founded the occasional project space and publishing house Kunstverein Toronto, where they have organized and published projects with Carolee Schneemann, Raimundas Malašauskas, Marcos Lutyens, Tamara Henderson, Angie Keefer, Steve Kado, Rachelle Sawatsky and cheyanne turions, Jason Dodge and CAConrad, Glenn Lewis, Derya Akay, Maryse Larivière and Andrew Paterson, among others.
Cwynar studied Art History at Queen’s University and Carleton University, earning her MA in 2010, and later participated in the de Appel Curatorial Programme in Amsterdam. She has held curatorial research positions at The Banff Centre, the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario, and has participated in curatorial and writing residencies at Fogo Island Arts, the Banff Centre and SOMA Mexico. Cwynar also writes on contemporary art for publications including Artforum, Frieze, C Magazineand Inuit Art Quarterly.
Erin Somerville is Deputy Director and Curator at White Columns, an alternative art space in New York City providing support to artists who have yet to benefit from wider critical, curatorial, or commercial attention. As New York’s oldest alternative space, Somerville’s work at White Columns has been dedicated to presenting culturally diverse exhibitions, programming, and services for visual artists. She has also served as a director for the Johann Koenig gallery in Berlin. In 2008, Somerville co-founded Cleopatra’s, a collaborative art and project space based in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, alongside fellow curators Bridget Finn and Bridget Donahue. From 2011-12, Cleopatra’s operated a second project space in Berlin under the same name. In September 2012, the collective curated an exhibition titled CKTV for the Brooklyn, City Pavilion at the 9th Shanghai Biennale and in 2013 traveled an iteration of that project to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in New York. Before her experience with White Columns and Cleopatra’s, Somerville worked at the Andrew Kreps Gallery in Chelsea. She was recently awarded the 2017 Emerging Artist Grant in New York City by the Rema Hort Mann Foundation.
