Over the past eight years, the Curatorial Forum has provided over 280 curators from 30 U.S. states an opportunity to engage with their peers and explore significant issues in the field. Co-produced by ICI and EXPO CHICAGO, the Forum is an unmatched program for curatorial exchange that has fostered strong national and regional networks for collaboration.
In 2023, the Curatorial Forum brought together more than 40 curators from across the United States. It featured a keynote lecture by Victoria Noorthoorn (Director, Museo Moderno, Buenos Aires), and closed-door sessions focused on the notion of care in the museum and curatorial fields as it relates to accessibility, community engagement, labor conditions, and new ways of working with artists.
The 2023 edition of the Forum also saw the addition of the Chicago Assembly, a cohort of Chicago-based curators including Sheridan Tucker Anderson, Antawan I. Byrd, Yi Cao, Jadine Collingwood, Nolan Jimbo, Stephanie Koch (Curatorial Assembly participant 2022), Adia Sykes, Asha Iman Veal, and Leslie Wilson. This group convened in the months prior to the Forum and has continued to meet regularly to identify how the themes advanced during the Forum hold special significance for the Chicago community.
Also starting in 2023, participants in the Curatorial Forum were able to apply for the Barbara Nessim Curatorial Travel Award, a grant of $3,000 given annually to one curator to support their travel and research needs for a project that advances the work of one or more women artists. This year's grantee is Stephanie Seidel (Curator, Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami), whose project builds on the foundational research she conducted for the exhibition Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight, which focused on Saar's immersive, site-specific installations since 1988. The planned monograph project, Constellations—The Installations of Betye Saar, will explore the artist's unique ways of employing assemblage techniques and its deep entanglement with Black feminist thought.
