Collective Curating
September 28, 2019
The Minnesota Museum of American Art
1-4pm
An afternoon-long event facilitated by Emerging Curators Institute (ECI) highlighting visionary local and national curators who are actively working to share power, build relationships, and engage communities through collaborative curatorial approaches. The event will showcase back-to-back talks by artist, activist, and curator A.L. Steiner, and writer, activist, and curator Chanida Phaengdara Potter. It will conclude with a short roundtable discussion between the two curators and Esther Callahan, the Curatorial Affairs Fellow at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia).
A.L. Steiner’s practice is a highly collaborative one, focused through, as she notes, “the sensibility of a skeptical queer ecofeminist androgyne.” Her shared work includes co-curating the project Ridykeulous and co-founding Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.), which works to make pay equitable to artists for their labor. As an artist Steiner has shown solo and collaborative works at the Museum of Modern Art, the 2014 Whitney Biennial, the New Museum, and many others.
Chanida Phaengdara Potter is the Executive Director and Community Architect of the multifaceted Southeast Asian Diaspora (SEAD) Project, which provides programs in Southeast Asian languages, culture, narrative storytelling, and leadership development among other projects. As a writer, Potter was a chair of the first National Lao American Writers Summit in Minneapolis (2010), co-founded the online publication Little Laos on the Prairie (2011-present), and co-authored Planting SEADs: Southeast Asian Diaspora Stories (2018).
Esther Callahan focuses her time at Mia on the measurable impact of Diversity, Inclusion, Equity, and Accessibility (IDEA) work, which affects professional exchanges internally and externally. She is co-curator of the 2019 “Mapping Black Identities” and “Mapping Black Identities: 3 Films” exhibitions. She is also the founder of the Curatorial Advisory Committee at Mia, which seeks to develop recommendations on curation, labeling, and programs in an IDEA representative way.
