Ways Forward: New Institutional Paradigms and Practices

Andrea Andersson serves as the founding director and chief curator of Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought, a multiplatform organization and research residency program based in New Orleans. As a writer and curator, Andersson has organized internationally touring exhibitions and is coediting a series of artists’ books together with Siglio Press that includes Adam Pendleton: Becoming Imperceptible (2016), Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen (2017), and Hinge Pictures: Eight Women Artists Occupy the Third Dimension (2019). She most recently coedited Sanford Biggers: Codeswitch (with Antonio Sergio Bessa; Yale University Press), which accompanies the eponymous coorganized exhibition currently on view at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles. Read more about the Rivers Institute.

Ryan N. Dennis is the chief curator and artistic director of the Center for Art and Public Exchange (CAPE) at the Mississippi Museum of Art. Dennis previously served as the curator and programs director at Project Row Houses, where her work focused on African American contemporary art with a particular emphasis on socially engaged practices, site-specific projects, public interventions, and the development of public-facing programs for adults and youth. She is deeply interested in facilitating the intersection of art and social justice while creating equitable opportunities for artists to thrive in their work. Read more about CAPE.

Barry Esson is a founding member of Arika, a Scotland-based political arts organization concerned with supporting connections between artistic production and social change. Arika produces Episodes, an iterative program of multiformat public events staged at Tramway, an arts venue in Glasgow, that addresses abolitionist politics, conceptual mathematics, disability justice, and the Black Radical Tradition, among other themes. Through its Local Organising program, Arika works to redistribute its access to resources and agency by making them available in solidarity with UK-based grassroots political communities who are pushing back against the violence of racist borders, poverty, and the criminalization of sex work.

In the US, Arika has collaborated with the House | Ballroom community for years, presenting projects at MoMA PS1, The New School, and Union Theological Seminary, among other venues. Arika organized A survey is a process of listening at the 2012 Whitney Biennial. In 2019, along with a steering group of artists from the cross-disability community and Performance Space New York, Arika organized I wanna be with you everywhere, a festival of Disability Aesthetics. Read more about Arika.

Sally Tallant is the president and executive director of the Queens Museum, New York. She was previously the director of the Liverpool Biennial (2011–19) and head of programs at London’s Serpentine Gallery (2001–11), where she was responsible for an integrated program of exhibitions, architecture, education, and public programs. Tallant has curated exhibitions and commissioned artists to make work in a wide range of settings including galleries, museums, public spaces, and nonart contexts. She is a regular contributor to conferences nationally and internationally. In 2018, Tallant was awarded an OBE for services to the arts in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List. Read more about Queens Museum’s Year of Uncertainty.

Mara Mills is associate professor of media, culture, and communication at New York University, where she cofounded and codirects the NYU Center for Disability Studies. She is also a founding editor of the journal Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. Mills works at the intersection of sound studies and disability studies. Most recently, she coedited the book Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality (Oxford, 2020) with Viktoria Tkaczyk and Alexandra Hui. She is currently coediting a special issue of Osiris on science and disability with Jaipreet Virdi and Sarah F. Rose, as well as an edited book on Crip Authorship with Rebecca Sanchez. Her public arts and humanities writing can be found at sites like Triple Canopy, Artforum, Public Books, Somatosphere, and Avidly—a channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books. Read more about Mara Mills.