Independent Curators International supports the work of curators to help create stronger art communities through experimentation, collaboration, and international engagement.

Independent Curators International supports the work of curators to help create stronger art communities through experimentation, collaboration, and international engagement.

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Herb Tam

Herb Tam is the Curator and Director of Exhibitions at the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA), New York where he recently curated Magazine Fever: Gen X Asian American Periodicals. In 2023, he curated with Lu Zhang Home-O-Stasis: Life and Livelihoods in Flushing in a neighborhood mini-mall in Queens, NY. 

He was the co-curator of Sour, Sweet, Bitter, Spicy: Stories of Chinese Food and Identity in America, which featured a video installation and ceramics that defined Chinese food in America, at MOCA in 2016. He also co-curated Waves of Identity: 35 Years of Archiving, an exhibition that explored the construction of Chinese American identity through the museum's archival materials; and in 2012 he curated America through a Chinese Lens, which surveyed photographs of America by contemporary artists and non-professional photographers of Chinese descent.

Previously, Tam was the Associate Curator at Exit Art and the Acting Associate Curator at the Queens Museum of Art. While at Exit Art, he curated New Mirrors: Painting in a Transparent World; and co-curated Summer Mixtape Volume 1, an exhibition exploring the role of pop music in the work of emerging artists. In 2007, Tam curated A Jamaica, Queens Thing, about the intersection between hip hop and the crack cocaine epidemic. He has also curated solo exhibitions with artists Lee Mingwei, Rafael Sanchez and Regina Jose Galindo, and has worked on historical exhibitions about urban planner Robert Moses and alternative art spaces in New York. Tam was born in Hong Kong and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. He studied at San Jose State University and earned a masters in fine arts from the School of Visual Arts, New York.