Artist Talk & Reception
Friday, February 2, 2018
Talk: 4:30 p.m., Reception: 5:30–7:30 p.m.
Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery
Crating the World
Roundtable Discussion
Thursday, February 8, 2018
4:30–6:00 p.m.
VCAM Object Study/Media Production Classroom 201
Based on the contributions by Ariella Azoulay and Gabrielle Moser for the upcoming publication by artist Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn, Crating the World addresses the colonial legacies of collecting, documenting and displaying practices in Western museums. Azoulay’s essay discusses the circulation of material culture from colonized countries while focusing on the local labor, shipping and distribution of material culture as intrinsic to Western self-identification and dismantling the social fabric of the source community. Moser examines the meaning of the wooden crates as vessels for a two-way cultural contamination, as well as for the emergence of civic rights, yet limited, for Indigenous communities in Northern Canada.
Quinn (Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs for the Penn Museum in Philadelphia) and Scott (Director of Museum Studies at Bryn Mawr College) examine questions of representing Africa in local institutions and will serve as moderators for the roundtable discussion.
Ariella Azoulay, Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature, Brown University, film essayist and independent curator of archives and exhibitions. Azoulay’s research and forthcoming book focus on potential history of key political concepts-institutions: archives, sovereignties, art, revolutions and human rights. Potential history, a concept and an approach that she has developed over the last decade, has far-reaching implications for the fields of political theory, knowledge formations and visual culture. Her books include: Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (Verso, 2012) and The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008). Her first photographic archive Act of State 1967-2007 is part of the Centre Pompidou collection and accessible to researchers.
Gabrielle Moser is a writer, educator and independent curator. Her writing appears in venues including Artforum.com, Canadian Art, Journal of Visual Culture, Photography & Culture, and Prefix Photo. Moser has held fellowships at the Paul Mellon Centre for the Study of British Art, the Ryerson Image Centre, the University of British Columbia and was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Brown University in 2017. She holds a PhD from the art history and visual culture program at York University in Toronto, Canada and is an Assistant Professor in art history at OCAD University.
Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn is a research-based artist based in Stockholm. She completed the Whitney’s Independent Study Program, New York, in 2011, having obtained her MFA and a post-graduate diploma in Critical Studies from the Malmö Art Academy, Sweden, in 2005, and a BFA from Concordia University, Montreal, in 2003. Nguyễn’s work has been shown internationally in institutions including the MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina (2017); SAVVY, Berlin (2017); EFA Project Space, New York (2016); Mercer Union, Toronto (2015); MTL BNL at the Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montreal (2014); Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany (2013); Apexart, New York (2013); and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2011). She has also been awarded a number of grants for her research-based practice from the Canada Council for the Arts; The Banff Centre’s Brenda and Jamie Mackie Fellowship for Visual Artists; The Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Program for Visual Arts; and the Swedish Research and Development Fellowship in the Arts. Nguyễn was also the 2017 Audain Visual Artist In Residence at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada and is currently participating in the fourth cycle of NTU Center for Contemporary Art Singapore’s Residencies Program.
Kate Quinn is the Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs for the Penn Museum in Philadelphia. She serves on an Executive Team that oversees all institutional planning and operations for the Museum– the largest university museum in North America. She leads the planning and implementation for special exhibitions, gallery projects, public programs, and special events. She holds a BA in theatre, an MFA in museum studies, certificates in museum leadership from the Getty Leadership Institute, National Arts Strategies, the Wharton School of Business, the Arts and Business Council of Philadelphia, and is an affiliated fellow with the American Academy in Rome. Quinn led exhibition projects for the Delaware Art Museum, Philadelphia Flower Show, and many theater, film, and television projects. Quinn serves on the Board of Directors for the International Council of Museums, the programming committee of the Global Philadelphia Association, the Editorial Board for Expedition Magazine, and the Resource Exchange, a creative reuse environmental organization in Philadelphia. She is a member of the American Alliance of Museums, National Association of Museum Exhibitions, the Mid-Atlantic Museum Association, the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries, the Museum Council of Philadelphia, and the International Council of Museums. She lectures in museum studies programs at the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, and the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala.
Monique Scott is an anthropologist with a career as both a scholar of museums and as a museum professional working within museums. After Monique Scott received her PhD in Anthropology from Yale University in 2004, she worked for more than ten years as head of cultural education at the American Museum of Natural History. Monique specializes in how diverse museum visitorsmake meaning of race and culture in museums, as well as how diverse audiences experience traditional anthropology and natural history museums as a whole, the basis for her 2007 bookEnvisioning African Origins. Her recent research focuses on the representation of Africa in contemporary art and anthropology exhibitions—re-examining the dense age-old tension between African objects displayed as Art or artifact. At Bryn Mawr College, Monique teaches about museums in the History of Art and Anthropology Departments and is the Director of a new interdisciplinary Museum Studies program. Monique is also a Consulting Scholar for the Africa Section at the Penn Museum and is on the African-American Collections Committee at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Monique is also a Research Associate in Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History and a Curatorial Fellow in Anthropology at the Yale Peabody Museum.