In January of 2021 Critical Conversations program organizers asked 15 cultural producers to gather into three groups to discuss how as curators, arts administrators, and writers they had approached and witnessed curation deployed to contend with and connect to the various forces at play in the world, their workplace, and their own minds during 2020. We invite you to join us in extending this conversation to a wider group of Oregon’s cultural producers.
On Curation in 2020 and Beyond is the culmination of our 2020-2021 convening program, which included unbound, facilitated by Sharita Towne as two Kaleidoscopic Conversations held on January 25, 2021 with roughly twenty participants who reflected on “how current Oregonian art ecologies support (or don’t support) Black, Indigenous, and artists and audiences of color.”, and Questioning Success: Reading and Thinking Together, facilitated by Bean Gilsdorf who convened a group of artists with curatorial practices to respond to William Deresiewicz’s latest book, The Death of the Artist: How Creators are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech.
Critical Conversations Convenings are a part of the interwoven work led by the University of Oregon with collaborators PNCA, PSU and Reed College, which is supported by The Ford Family Foundation Visual Arts Program. Convenings support Oregon cultural producers by seeding discourse and stimulating community related to exhibition making and arts writing. These endeavors serve the Visual Arts Program’s core mission to further the successes of established, working, artists in the state. Each year’s convening is composed of 3-5 sessions that manifest in various capacities: public programs, think-tanks, directed group conversations or work among colleagues. Participants are drawn from exhibition makers and arts writers in the state of Oregon, regardless of institutional affiliation, academic credentials, or location.
The scales and degree of public access for these sessions are dependent on their individual objective, the vision of the facilitator, and its position in relation to other Critical Conversations programming. On Curation in 2020 and Beyond is accessible through this April 6 event, and both unbound and Questioning Success will be represented in FIGURING, a publication produced by Critical Conversations to be released in May 2021.
By joining this event you agree to authorize University of Oregon’s School of Art + Design Department of Art to record the event for archival purposes and to post as streaming video on Critical Conversations YouTube Channel and UO’s Center for Art Research’s website.