On October 20 at 12pm, Dr. Thea Quiray Tagle (University of Massachusetts Boston), Dr. Anita Haldemann (Kunstmuseum Basel), Dr. Sooa Im McCormick (Cleveland Museum of Art), and Dr. Maureen Warren (Krannert Museum of Art) will discuss how the pandemic and racial struggles have reshaped global museum work. The participating curators and scholars will address the challenges, as well as the new trajectories and avenues for engaging the public that emerged as the result of the global health and race crises. The goal of this panel is to generate active discussions about the impact of these events on the museum as an institution, curatorial practices, and museum professionals.
Dr. Anita Haldemann is a Swiss art historian, currently serving as Deputy Director and Head of the Kupferstichkabinett at the Kunstmuseum Basel. She became head of the Kupferstichkabinett (Department of Prints and Drawings) at the Kunstmuseum Basel in 2017. In that capacity, Anita has curated numerous, highly acclaimed exhibitions of drawing and prints, ranging from the 19th through the 21st century. Since 2019, Anita was a member of the Kunstmuseum's Executive Board, as well as the Head of Art and Research and the Deputy Director of the Museum. She has held teaching positions at the Universities of Bern and Basel. She curated exhibition of 19th century drawings and prints that included a major exhibition on Cézanne's sketchbooks in 2017. Anita Haldemann also organized important drawing retrospectives on artists, such as Rosemarie Trockel (2010), Markus Raetz (2013) and Maria Lassnig (2018). She also curated exhibitions and published widely on younger contemporary artists, including Rozá El-Hassan (2012) and Catharina van Eetvelde (2017). Her most recent and widely acclaimed 2021 retrospective exhibition on Kara Walker (2021), titled “Kara Walker: A Black Hole Is Everything a Star Longs to Be.”
Dr. Sooa Im McCormick joined the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2015 as a curator of Korean art. Her interests include Korean art and architecture from the 1600s to the present and the crosscurrents in East Asian visual culture from the 1600s to the 1800s. Sooa curated several important exhibitions at Cleveland Art Museum, including Chaekgeori: Pleasure of Possessions in Korean Painted Screens (August 5–November 5, 2017) and Gold Needles: Embroidery Arts from Korea (March 8−July 26, 2020). She is currently working on a major international loan exhibition focusing on masterworks of the Goryeo period (918–1392), which examines the artistic legacy of those works from a cross-cultural perspective. As a cutting-edge scholar, she has published widely on the intersections between art and ecology and the issues of gender and diversity. Her articles include “Stitches Empowered: Art of Embroidery and Patchwork from Korea” in Orientations (March 2020) and “Re-Reading the Imagery of Tilling and Weaving of Eighteenth-Century Korean Genre Painting in the Context of the Little Ice Age” in Mountains and Rivers (without) End: An Anthology of Eco–Art History in Asia (2019).
Dr. Thea Quiray Tagle is a transdisciplinary feminist scholar and is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Program in Critical Ethnic & Community Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She was the Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Associate in Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 2015-2016. Her research has been published in academic journals including American Quarterly, Critical Ethnic Studies, ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, and Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas. Thea specializes in curating and writing about contemporary art and performance projects by Black, Indigenous, people of color, queer, and diasporic artists working in installation, socially engaged art, film and new media. She has curated visual art exhibitions and performances for The Alice in Seattle, Feast Arts Center (Tacoma, WA), the Asian Art Museum (San Francisco), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Centro Cultural de la Raza (San Diego). From November 9, 2020-February 7, 2021, the second iteration of Thea’s long-term curatorial project, AFTER LIFE, was viewable in person, outdoors and socially distant, at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. This visual art, social practice, and new media exhibition featured 17 artists whose work helps us creatively imagine survival strategies for climate collapse, policing/surveillance, displacement, and other forms of slow violence.
Dr. Maureen Warren has been a curator of European and American Art at Krannert Art Museum (KAM) since September 2015. Her research interests include early modern (1500-1800) Netherlandish art and European political print media. At KAM, Maureen has curated exhibitions on medieval manuscripts (2016-2017) and the intersection of art and natural history in early modern Europe (2017). Her most recent exhibitions include, “Sacred/Supernatural: Religion, Myth, and Magic in Early Modern European Prints” (on view at KAM at the end of January 27, 2022) and “Fake News and Lying Pictures: Political Prints in the Dutch Republic” on display at Krannert Art Museum, University of San Francisco, and Smith Art Museums in August 2022. Prior to her arrival at KAM, Dr. Warren was an Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Research Fellow in the Prints and Drawings Department of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her doctoral research was supported by a Kress Institutional Fellowship to Leiden University, a Scaliger Fellowship, and a Swann Foundation for Caricature and Cartoon Fellowship. Maureen has published essays in Early Modern Low Countries, Death, Torture and the Broken Body in European Art, 1300-1650 (2015); Van Dyck, Rembrandt, and the Portrait Print (2016); and Word & Image to only name a few.
Zoom Recording: