The Curating Place Symposium considers contemporary approaches to curating in three distinct situations, the European and state funded art institution, the American non-profit museum, and the University museum. The discussion will include three curators that work in such institutions who will discuss their goals and challenges within these particular spaces. Considering how exhibitions are influenced by the institutional context, which they are conceived for, this discussion will trace various practices of curating in the field today. Through three short presentations and a panel discussion moderated by Miriam Paeslack, this symposium will highlight and tease out the critical transformations in the field of curating and exhibition making; and the cultural, political and fiscal components that impact these transformations in their respective settings today. The field of curation has grown significantly in the last decade and expands now beyond the museum and gallery context, which is why we specifically address and reach out to students and faculty across the humanities, social sciences and architecture.

Confirmed participants:

Niels Van Tome (Director and Chief Curator, De Appel, Amsterdam),

Cathleen Chaffee (Chief Curator, Albright-Knox Art Gallery)

Rachel Adams (Senior Curator of Exhibitions, UB Art Gallery)

Moderated by Miriam Paeslack (Associate Professor, Arts Management Program, UB)

Niels Van Tomme is the director and chief curator at De Appel in Amsterdam since 2016. As a curator, lecturer and critic, he works on the intersections of contemporary culture and social awareness. His exhibitions and events have been presented at The Kitchen (New York), Akademie der Künste (Berlin), Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans), Gallery 400 (Chicago), National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), and P! (New York). In 2016 he curated the Bucharest Biennale 7: What are we building down there? He is a contributing editor at Art Papers magazine. His texts are published in Art in America, The Wire, Camera Austria, Afterimage, and Metropolis M. Recent books are Perspectives (2015) and Muntadas: About Academia: Activating Artifacts (2017).

De Appel organizes exhibitions, performances, film screenings, lectures and gatherings that cross boundaries between the arts and other disciplines. These programs facilitate artistic and socially relevant dialogues with various cultural and societal organizations, both in Amsterdam and beyond. In addition, De Appel is home to a world-renowned curatorial program and houses an extensive archive and library. De Appel was founded in 1975 as an initiative of Wies Smals, making it one of the oldest non-profit contemporary arts institutes in the Netherlands.

Dr. Cathleen Chaffee is the Chief Curator at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. She was Horace W. Goldsmith Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Yale University Art Gallery from 2010 to 2014 and previously held curatorial positions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. At the Albright-Knox, Chaffee has organized exhibitions such as Joe Bradley, Shade: Clyfford Still / Mark Bradford, Erin Shirreff, Eija-Liisa Ahtila: Ecologies of Drama, and Overtime: The Art of Work. At Yale, she organized the inaugural installation of the modern collection following a multi-year renovation and expansion of the gallery spaces, and numerous other exhibitions. Chaffee’s writing has been published in magazines such as Artforum, Frieze, Contemporary, Mousse, and Manifesta Journal. Her essays and books have addressed the work of Richard Artschwager, Carol Bove, Marcel Broodthaers, Hanne Darboven, and Joëlle Tuerlinckx, among many others. Chaffee received her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and was awarded a 2008 Fulbright Fellowship to Belgium in order to complete research for her dissertation, Décors: Marcel Broodthaers’s Late Exhibition Practice 1974–75. She received her master’s degree from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, and completed her undergraduate studies at Ithaca College.

Rachel Adams is the Senior Curator of Exhibitions for the University at Buffalo Art Galleries. Her areas of research include the crossover between contemporary art and architecture, as well as video and new media practices. At the UB Art Galleries, she has curated a number of exhibitions including Wanderlust: Actions, Traces, Journeys 1967-2017, Lydia Okumura: Situations, Claire Ashley: Loathsome Beauty Loaded Body, Ragnar Kjartansson: The Visitors, Splitting Light and co-curated The Language of Objects with Robert Scalise and Introducing Tony Conrad: A Retrospective with Cathleen Chaffee. Prior to coming to UB in 2015, she worked as an independent curator, planning and executing exhibitions with national and international artists at many venues, among them The Contemporary, Austin; Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, Portland, Ore.; testsite Austin, Artspace 108, and Greene Exhibitions, Los Angeles, Calif. Her most recent exhibition project, Wanderlust, is currently on view at the Des Moines Art Center with accompanying catalog was published at MIT press. Adams received a bachelor of fine arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a master’s degree in exhibition and museum studies from the San Francisco Art Institute.

Dr. Miriam Paeslack’s research spans urban imagery and culture from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, with a special emphasis on theories of modernity and modernism, the intersection of aesthetics, philosophy, and political theory, visual studies, and German, Italian and North American culture, especially fin-de-siècle Berlin. Paeslack is the author of Berlin im 19.Jahrhundert: Frühe Photographien 1850–1914 (Schirmer/Mosel, 2015); and editor of Ineffably Urban: Imaging Buffalo (Ashgate, 2013). Her essays and research are published in journals, such as Future Anterior, the Journal of Architecture, and Fotogeschichte. Her book on photography in fin-de-siècle Berlin, Constructing Imperial Berlin: Photography and the Metropolis is scheduled for publication by University of Minnesota Press in 2018. She is associate professor of modern and contemporary visual culture and arts management at the University at Buffalo (SUNY).

This program is supported by the UB Humanities Institute, The UB Art Galleries, and the Art Department.