Since 2016, EXPO Chicago has partnered with Independent Curators International (ICI), which develops networks for curators working in the United States and abroad. The fair has provided both a platform and occasion for ICI’s now annual Curatorial Forum, which convenes a group of 40 curators from across the US, spotlighting mid-career and established curators presenting keynote lectures and facilitating closed-door sessions for US-based curators. It also offers networking lunches and opportunities for them to engage with local artists, museums, private collections and galleries.

On the surface, it may seem logical for a group of curators to attend any large-scale art event, from the Venice Biennale to a commercial art fair like EXPO Chicago, but practically it makes sense for few. It’s a minority of museum curators who have the budget or capacity to acquire works for their collections from art fairs, let alone through the gallery system at market values. Several curators included in ICI’s forum represent independent practices, as well as non-profit art spaces, university galleries and foundations, many of which have no collections at all. Moreover, the art fair is generally not the place for those seeking academically rigorous, highly researched exhibitions of art. They are art fairs. This said the presence of relevant contemporary curators moving and shaking within their domain provides a useful cache to the overall fair context.

It’s particularly interesting that this curatorial convention has only ever taken place in Chicago, not at the Armory Show in New York or Frieze in London, much larger and higher-profile fairs. This could be because Chicago’s less-developed commercial infrastructure is overshadowed by the strength of its institutions. A large percentage of the city’s artists are faculty at the various art schools attuned to mentorship and support, advising the waves of art students who pour into Chicago every year. Artists locally are much more likely to name-drop their artistic lineage (i.e. PopeL. was my teacher’s teacher) than their gallery representation. In short, Chicago is focused much more on art ideas than on art sales, to its intellectual benefit and sometimes to its financial detriment (especially for the artists). For this reason, the Curatorial Forum aligns with EXPO Chicago, which also highlights a wealth of non-commercial cultural organisations. In fact, its presence has served to raise the bar, providing meaningful character and an intentional agenda that distinguishes it from other art fairs. It also supports the idea of curators as essential stakeholders within the larger art ecosystem, on equal footing with collectors.  

This year the Forum featured a two-day public conference titled Curating and the Commons, which comprised a keynote by writer and curator Miguel A. López, a three-part panel series featuring curators and arts organisations refining a logic for values-based arts leadership and culminated in a two-part Directors Summit.

Set to curate the upcoming Toronto Biennial of Art, López presented curating as an inherently political endeavour. He shared a combination of projects: a highly researched exhibition about social disobedience through the lens of art from across Latin America in the 1980s, inviting the audience to think “transversally,” and presenting a political, not a chronological, understanding of that decade; and a solo exhibition about Giuseppe Campuzano, an artist López argued was also a philosopher and curator whose practice queered historiographic museum methods to reclaim and uplift trans histories from erasure. Additionally, he presented the embodied collaborative practice that organisers of the art platform TEOR/éTica in San Jose, Costa Rica, have experimented with in an attempt to decelerate the pace of arts administration and create more supportive, nurturing environments for arts workers. Far from a dry academic lecture, López managed to make curating seem like an art practice, a creative channel for ideas and experiments more capacious than the ivory tower.

The three panels of Curating and the Commons adopted a loose temporal frame. Each included US and international perspectives, with a specific invitation to a Chicago-based curator to play double duty, participating in the panel while also moderating it (Disclosure: I participated as moderator of one of the panels). Common Knowledge, led fluidly by scholar Sampada Aranke, presented art history and archival history as a public service, with accessibility and public invitation as guiding principles. Afro Charities in Baltimore, for example, uses a rich archive of AFRO American Newspapers as a living entity that artists and the public must engage with to articulate an iterative, non-progressivist understanding of the United States' past and by extension, present.

Perhaps the highlight of the series was Common Space, which took the biennial context as the principal form through which curators engage with public space(s) in the present, amidst the complexity of increased privatisation. Risa Puleo laid out a set of ethics guiding her curatorial work for last year’s Counterpublic exhibition in St. Louis: not to restage an occupation through artworks and to evade surveillance or risk being policed or captured, even by images. The perspective demonstrated an intentional way to develop a large-scale, city-wide exhibition led by ethics and followed by forms and artworks.

Common Future presented an unlikely but generative pairing between The Black School in New Orleans, which is in the emergent process of building an alternative learning platform inspired by the Black Panthers’ educational work in the 1970s and Askeaton Contemporary Arts, a project in rural Ireland, which invites artists to engage with ancient history and architecture by creating responsive contemporary artworks in the landscape, building a palimpsest of knowledge and practice in the region.

Finally, this year’s two-part Directors Summit created a platform for a group of emerging US museum leaders in an intensive programme which included public-facing moments to address shifting dynamics within the field and uplifting the potential for museums to offer a third space, between home and work, to foster civil society and civic engagement.

This year, US participants of the Curatorial Forum were joined by an international contingent from EXPO Chicago’s Curatorial Exchange. The potential of enabling connection for practice on the local, national and transnational levels is massive and could be the most meaningful part of ICI’s endeavour. Creating space for curators to meet as peers, despite their geographies, to find overlaps among their unique contexts and challenges–from increased authoritarianism to war, displacement of people (including artists), to fragile elections, censorship, privatisation of public space, shrinking arts budgets and the impact of the climate crisis on different regions—could be profoundly transformative for the field.

However, most of the Curatorial Exchange participants came from Western Europe and North America with travel supported by their institutions, embassies and consulates with budgets large enough to support mobility for culture workers. This means vital global perspectives were missing from the cohort: from Central and South Asia, from the African continent, and South America, all of which could have contributed essential points of view on the urgency of curating today. Perhaps consulates from wealthier Western nations could work together to support a sizeable group of curators from the rest of the world to enrich the overall discourse at the Curatorial Forum. The Forum and its participants could benefit tremendously if ICI instigated a decoupling of national identity from financial resources, creating material change for curators. This could be a useful model for how curators could expand their perspectives on how they work with artists in their localities. All told, the Forum is evolving to become an important third space within the field, demarcating a context for practice to convene, highlighting essential operating values and expanding an idea of curating that continues to iterate and evolve.

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR or its Editors.)