Curators’ Introduction for Unsettled Landscapes

Ellen was tapped to moderate the curators’ panel that opened Unsettled Landscapes: New Perspectives on Art of the Americas at SITE Santa Fe in July 2014.

The participants included: Irene Hofmann, Phillips director and chief curator of Santa Fe. Irene is director of the new biennial series, SITElines, that the exhibition titled Unsettled Landscapes launched. Janet Dees is curator of special projects of SITE and SITElines Center program director. The guest curators of Unsettled Landscapes were Candice Hopkins, who holds a master’s from the Center of Curatorial Studies at Bard and whose curatorial gigs have taken place at: National Gallery of Canada, the Western Front, the Banff Centre’s Walter Phillips Gallery and the Museum of Contemporary Native Art in Santa Fe. Lucia Sanroman is an independent curator and writer who was associate curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego from 2006-11. She was awarded the 2012 Warhol Foundation Curatorial Fellowship for Citizen Culture: Art and Architecture Shape Policy, an exhibit that took place at Santa Monica Museum from September 13-December 30th, 2014.

Questions included collaboration/”collective bargaining” by four individual curators on this new project; the scope of the “landscapes” they sought to define as unsettled; a new model deviating from a “pavilion” or country-to-country approach to biennials; and sensitivity to local conditions as they did their curatorial work.