Kate Sierzputowski is a curator, writer, and independent arts organizer based in Chicago, IL. Her work focuses on presenting artists’ practices outside of their typical confines—curating exhibitions in vases, on ears, and at miniature scale. Using scale as an inclusive tool, she co-founded the international miniature fair Barely Fair in 2019 to promote under-recognized spaces. Currently she serves as Director of Programming at EXPO CHICAGO, where she collaborates with partners across the world to present leading panel conversations as a part of the fair’s /Dialogues program and brings international curators to Chicago during the fair each year.
Kate is also co-director of the artist-run space Julius Caesar, where she has organized exhibitions with local and international artists such as Kelly Kaczynski, Julien Prévieux, and Kyle Dunn since 2015. She is a frequent collaborator with Mary Eleanor Wallace for their curatorial project EPISODE which recently presented an exhibition of works carved out of butter; runs an apartment gallery called AIRLOCK with her boyfriend and sound engineer Sam Clapp, and landlord and Drag City founder Dan Koretzky; has recently curated solo presentations in her apartment in both her shower and a vase; and has a small curatorial project on her ear called Chandelier. Kate’s exhibitions and projects have been featured in the Chicago Reader, Chicago Magazine, and the Chicago Tribune, and she was recently featured as a part of NewCity’s Art 50 in 2022.
In her role as Director of Programming at EXPO CHICAGO she has organized dozens of partner panels with international institutions, curators, and artists. Presented in partnership with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), Kate produces/Dialogues during EXPO CHICAGO which offers panel discussions, conversations and provocative artistic discourse with leading artists, curators, designers, and arts professionals. Highlights of the 2022 edition of /Dialogues included a historic gathering of founding and key members of AFRICOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists) in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist; a bilingual conversation with 2022 EXPOSURE curator Humberto Moro and artists from his curated section of the fair; and talks with leading artists such as Derrick Adams, Dawoud Bey, Krista Franklin, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Devan Shimoyama, Gio Swaby, and more.
In addition, she helped produce the 2021 digital symposiums Alternate Assembly (which focused on art and the environment) and Art as a Catalyst for Change in collaboration with the Malmo Art Museum. She helped launch the first edition of the fair’s Director Summit in 2022, which brought emerging museum directors from across the country to participate in a three-day symposium which included a keynote from Dr. Maria Rosario Jackson, chair of the NEA. Kate produces EXPO CHICAGO’s Curatorial Forum in collaboration with ICI, which brings over 40 national curators to Chicago each year, and brings an additional 20 international curators to Chicago in collaboration with more than a dozen consulates.
Kate graduated from Ohio University in 2012 with a Bachelor of Science in Journalism and after a short career as a taxi cab journalist, began writing essays, criticism, and conducting artist interviews for publications such as Hyperallergic, Chicago Reader, Teen Vogue, and Chicago Magazine. Kate ran the digital publication INSIDE\WITHIN from 2013-2018 which featured interviews and studio visits with Chicago's emerging and established artists, such as Candida Alvarez, McArthur Binion, Richard Rezac, Rashayla Marie Brown, Nate Young, and William J. O’Brien. Previously, she was the Senior Editor at Colossal; has written essays for the Tremaine Foundation, Hyde Park Art Center, local and national galleries; and was published in Where the Future Came from: A Collective Research Project on the Role of Feminism in Chicago's Artist-Run Culture from the Late-Nineteenth Century. Kate is frequently featured as a guest lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
