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Part of the Un/Doing Event Series
This seminar with curator, writer, and Ethnic Studies scholar Dr. Thea Quiray Tagle will cover different models of working with BIPOC visual artists that challenge the alienating norms behind much art historical scholarship and curatorial practice. Beginning from a case study of curating AFTER LIFE (we survive)—a group show featuring minoritarian artists dealing with different forms of slow violence and climate collapse—during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Quiray Tagle forwards an ethical practice of collaboration between scholars and artists that she dubs "relational curation." Relational curation is grounded in principles of right relation, reciprocity, and accountability, and directly draws from Black feminist thought, Indigenous Studies, and other queer and feminist Ethnic Studies theorists. By thinking together in this seminar, we will dream and discuss ways of working relationally with others, in order to disrupt who and what scholarship, art exhibitions, and art itself are for.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Thea Quiray Tagle, PhD (she/her) is a Filipinx femme curator, writer, and transdisciplinary scholar whose research broadly investigates photography, socially engaged art and site-specific performance; visual cultures of violence and waste; urban planning and the environment; and grassroots responses to political crises and ecological collapse in and across the Pacific. Across her various research and creative projects, a question that drives Thea’s work is: how can socially engaged art and performance move us, collectively and individually, to work towards more just and livable futures that are anti-capitalist, feminist, and queer? How can art and performance model practices of right relation with other humans and non-human life, that might impact how we choose to live in the day-to-day? She was the Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Associate in Asian American Studies at UIUC from 2015-2016, and earned a PhD in Ethnic Studies from UC San Diego. Her writing has been published in a variety of outlets including American Quarterly, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Hyperallergic, and BOMB Magazine. She is co-curator of New York Now: Home, the inaugural contemporary photography triennial at the Museum of the City of New York, scheduled to open in March 2023. Dr. Quiray Tagle is the Associate Curator of the Bell Gallery and Brown Arts Institute (BAI) at Brown University. Photo by Dan Paz