Independent Curators International (ICI) supports the work of curators to help create stronger art communities through experimentation, collaboration, and international engagement. Curators are arts community leaders and organizers who champion artistic practice; build essential infrastructures and institutions; and generate public engagement with art. Our collaborative programs connect curators across generations, and across social, political and cultural borders. They form an international framework for sharing knowledge and resources — promoting cultural exchange, access to art, and public awareness for the curator’s role.
Inka Essenhigh

Inka Essenhigh is a New York-based artist. Her painted visions are richly colored distorted fables peopled with archetypes, sprites, and anthropomorphized nature. The paintings breathe and undulate with life as ocean becomes sea monster, tree becomes goddess, or hipster bar-goers become drunken ghouls. The imagery is imbued with a sense of a collective unconscious and mischievous narrative that makes its way into each landscape, building, and figure. As she describes it, her mythologies strive for “the feeling of an inner vision” captured during the witching twilight hours. Inka Essenhigh has been in such shows as “Comic Abstraction” Museum of Modern Art in New York, “USA Today” at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, 2nd Berlin Biennale in Berlin, Germany, SITE Santa Fe Biennial in Santa Fe New Mexico and the Bienal de Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil. She has had many one-person museum shows such as: the Albright Knox Museum, Buffalo, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; DA2 Domus Artium, Centro de Arte de Salamanca, Spain and The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland. Over the years she has shown with Deitch Projects, Mary Boone Gallery and 303 gallery. She has recently shown at Baldwin Gallery in Aspen. She is represented by Victoria Miro Gallery in London. She is currently getting ready for “Between Worlds”, a show of works form the last 10 years at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville TN, opening May 27, 2016.
involved in:
PaintersNYC: Panel Discussion
Curatorial Intensive alumna Meaghan Kent and co-curator & Artist Maureen Cavanaugh will moderate a panel discussion with artists Inka Essenhigh, Clare Grill, and Eamon Ore-Giron.
read more »My Reality: Contemporary Art and the Culture of Japanese Animation
My Reality investigates the effect that Japanese animation (anime) has had on today’s art in Japan and other Asian countries and in the West.
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