2023 Curatorial Research Fellow: Margaret Kross

During her Fellowship, Margaret Kross will research artistic strategies of abstraction and conceptual practice in considering the built environment within the Mississippi River Basin. She will focus on artists who, by utilizing these specific strategies, intervene in the fiction that the land is an abstract concept. The project will further her previous research interrogating how “immaterial” land policies and plans have a fundamentally material impact. This particular deep dive will explore how unseen beliefs that shape the built environment in turn shape psychological space. It aims to study how narratives of the land might, likewise, be reimagined and enter collective consciousness through abstract and conceptual gestures embedded in the artwork.

Kross is based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a city delineated by three rivers, though local lore has long mythologized an unseen “fourth river” beneath the ground. Using the “fourth river” as a conceptual anchor, the project seeks to map a metaphorical relationship between the oppressive materiality of the built environment in the Mississippi Basin region and the materiality of memory, emotion, and narrative.

Margaret Kross (b. 1988, Pittsburgh, PA, she/her) is a writer and curator. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, CURA, Frieze, and Flash Art as well as museum publications. She has held curatorial roles at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and managed Media, Engagement, and Special Projects at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. She previously held gallery positions at Laurel Gitlen and Paula Cooper. In addition to her curatorial and collections work, current independent projects include founding and editing a limited-run journal, Mossflower, focused on the process and labor of studio practice through prose, poetry, images, and archives from over thirty contributing artists and writers. The inaugural issue focuses on ideas of residue. She also runs Romance, an occasional apartment exhibition space.

At the Whitney, Kross co-organized Bunny Rogers: Brig Und Ladder (2017) and worked with artists Carolina Caycedo, Demian DinéYazhi´, Ginger Dunnill, Torkwase Dyson, Cy Gavin, Lena Henke, and Erin Jane Nelson in co-organizing Between the Waters (2018), both in collaboration with Elisabeth Sherman. Kross worked on curatorial teams for the 2022 Whitney Biennial, co-organized by David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards; David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night (2018), co-organized by David Breslin and David Kiehl; Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight (2016), organized by Dana Miller; and multiple thematic survey shows from the museum’s permanent collection. She holds an MA in Modern and Contemporary Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies from Columbia University.

This Curatorial Research Fellowship is made possible in part by a generous grant from the Ruth Foundation for the Arts, as well as support from ICI's Board of Trustees and Leadership Council.