Decolonizing Curatorial Practice

Independent curator Risa Puleo will speak about two exhibitions made in 2018 that directed the resources of the exhibition venue towards practices of solidarity and coalition building between artists and with communities. At the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Puleo’s exhibition Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the Justice System took institutional critique as a method for examining the historical and contemporary relationship between the museum and the prison, arguing that any consideration of justice within the art-industrial complex must begin with an examination of the colonial histories of its institutions. At Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, NE, Puleo used the exhibition Monarchs: Brown and Native Artists in the Path of the Butterfly as a platform for building community amongst artists indigenous to the Americas and living in both rural and urban regions of the United States. The exhibition generated a series of “Brown Artist Retreats,” organized in collaboration with the artist Rafa Esparza, in the cities to which it traveled that furthered its subtext of fostering solidarities across national and regional borders.