Beginning on March 28th, Project Row Houses will present a series of lunchtime talks featuring Houston-based curators Sally Frater, Dean Daderko, Danielle Burns and Marcela Guerrero. Addressing notions of place, diaspora, history, identity and community each speaker will highlight specific projects to illustrate the ways in which they engage with and consider these issues within their research and respective curatorial practices. The talks will begin at 12:00 noon and audiences will have the opportunity to hear each curator speak about their work and to participate in a conversation following each talk. Light refreshments will be served.
Thursday March 28th – Sally Frater
Focusing on a series of exhibitions that were presented at The Print Studio/Centre3 artist-run center in Hamilton, Ontario and the Glassell School of Art in Houston, TX Sally Frater will explore how her consideration of site, i.e. geography, architecture and memory their relationship to identity has informed her recent curatorial projects.
Thursday April 11th – Dean Daderko
Dean Daderko will speak about the Perspectives 182: LaToya Ruby Frazier, which opens at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston on June 20th, 2013. CAMH’s solo presentation of Frazier’s work elaborates how Frazier’s concerns with issues of representation, autonomy, and community are manifested in her documentary photographs and videos.
Thursday April 18th – Danielle Burns – CANCELLED
Presenting on past curatorial projects at the Gregory School and the Houston Museum of African American Culture, Danielle Burns will highlight the ways in which she addresses themes of history, space and diaspora in her practice.
Thursday May 9th – Marcela Guerrero
Malian cultural theorist and filmmaker’s Manthia Diawara’s One World in Relation follows Edouard Glissant on a cross-Atlantic journey from South Hampton (UK) to Brooklyn (NY). Using One World in Relation as a framework, Marcela Guerrero will explore the ways in which Glissant’s theories of creolization serve as useful tools for understanding and interpreting art of the Caribbean and Latin America.
Speaker bios
Sally Frater is an independent curator and writer. She holds an Honors BA in Studio Art from the University of Guelph and an MA (with Distinction) in Contemporary Art from The University of Manchester and Sotheby’s Institute of Art. In her curatorial practice she is interested in exploring issues of identity, history, memory, spatial theory, photography as well as issues of representation and equity in gallery and museum practices. She has received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council and has served on juries for the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council and the Houston Arts Alliance. A member of IKT and ICI (Independent Curators International) and co-founder of Third Space Art Projects, she is currently a Core Critical Studies Fellow at the Glassell School at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the artist-in-residence at Project Row Houses, Houston.
Dean Daderko’s first exhibition as Curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, It is what it is. Or is it? considered the legacy of Duchamp’s readymade as the form nears its 100th anniversary and addressed the increasingly social, political and temporal concerns the form engages. His current exhibition Parallel Practices: Joan Jonas & Gina Pane considers the work of two foundational performance artists working in New York and Paris respectively. Daderko has organized exhibitions and programs for Artists’ Space, Art in General, Visual AIDS, and The Kitchen in New York; Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires, Argentina; and the Center for Contemporary Art in Vilnius, Lithuania. He was the recipient of a 2008-09 Curatorial Research Fellowship from the French American Cultural Exchange and has taught and lectured at Yale University, Cooper Union, and M.I.T. Daderko’s writing has appeared in publications by the Studio Museum in Harlem, El Museo del Barrio, Rutgers University and the Americas’ Society.
Danielle Burns is curator of special exhibitions at both the African American Library at the Gregory School and the former curator at the Houston Museum of African American Culture (HMAAC) in Houston, TX. She is an adjunct professor of art history and art appreciation at Lone Star College-North Harris Campus. She received her B.A. in history and political science from Prairie View A & M University, and her M.A. in art history from the City University of New York, Brooklyn College. Burns has also worked at the Allen Sheppard Gallery in NYC and the Saint Louis Art Museum where she was the distinguished Saint Louis Art Museums Romare Bearden Fellow 2008-2009. Other fellowships include the Mickey Leland International Enhancement Fellow where she studied contemporary East African art at the University of Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania.
Marcela Guerrero’s area of research is postcolonial Caribbean art, with an emphasis on photography, installation, and performance art. She is especially interested in understanding the visual economy of the arts from the Caribbean and the strategies used by artists to depict themes of migration, diaspora, transnationality, space, and ethnicity. As a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin, Ms. Guerrero is writing her dissertation thesis on the ways we can translate concepts such as Creole and creolization to the visual arts. A past instructor of college-level Latin American art history and other related courses, Guerrero is currently the Research Coordinator of the International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA) at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH).
