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RESEARCH FELLOWSHIPS
Over the last decade, ICI has developed Research Fellowships for emerging and mid-career curators, aimed at supporting them in the advancement of their practice and to generate new knowledge in the field. These Research Fellowships have complemented ICI’s professional development programs for curators at all career levels, from the Curatorial Intensive for emerging curators and the Curatorial Seminar for midcareer professionals, to other research-focused and network-building convenings for all professionals, such as the Curatorial Forum. ICI Research Fellowships were often created through partnerships with other organizations and foundations, such as the French Institute, the Joyce Foundation, and SAHA, as well as most recently with the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (see next pages for details on the ICI/ CPPC Travel Award). ICI Research Fellowships offer opportunities to leverage ICI’s programs and our international network of collaborators to travel, learn from one another, and pursue lines of inquiry into artistic and curatorial practices. ICI is expanding its program of curatorial Research Fellowships, with a focus on promoting experimentation, collaboration, and international engagement in the field. The expansion is primarily aimed towards ICI’s Curatorial Intensive alumni, and part of a series of new opportunities providing alumni with critical support as they move through the stages of their career.
This Spring, new Research Fellowships will offer continued learning opportunities, mentorship, and support to four mid-career curators based anywhere around the world. Each fellowship is structured by the curator’s goals to develop new knowledge and their needs for the advancement of their practice. Fellows have access to advisement sessions with a mentor, to meetings with ICI Collaborators from across our network, and to travel opportunities to conduct their research. Updates on the development of the Fellows’ research will be posted on ICI’s Website through the end of the year.
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The new Research Fellowships will be announced in April, and will focus on independent curatorial practice in the Midwestern United States; the development of collaborative networks for art education in Southern Africa; and Indigenous curatorial and artistic practices, in conjunction with ICI’s traveling exhibition Soundings.
For more information contact Monica Terrero at monica@curatorsintl.org.
ICI’s new, expanded program of Research Fellowships in 2020 is made possible with the leading support of the Hartfield Foundation, and by grants from the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, as well as generous contributions from the members of ICI’s Leadership Council.
Brandon Alvendia, ICI Research Fellow. Curatorial Intensive in New Orleans, March 2015.
Tania Willard, Surrounded/Surrounding, 2018, installation view in Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts, Agnes Etherington Arts Centre at Queens University, Toronto. Collection of the artist. Gifted to Four Directions Aboriginal Student Centre, Kingston, 2019. Photo by Paul Litherland. Courtesy of AEAC and ICI.
Research Fellowships
Since 2012, ICI and Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC) have partnered to support individual curatorial research in Central America and the Caribbean. The program supports a contemporary art curator based anywhere in the world to travel to the region and conduct research about art and cultural activities; it has produced unique scholarship, and perspectives, as well as new collaborations across the region and internationally. Previous ICI/CPPC Travel Award recipients included Pablo Leon de la Barra, Remco de Blaaij, Maria Elena Ortiz, Leah Gordon and Andre Eugene, Marina Reyes Franco.
In 2019, Pablo José Ramírez, a curator, theorist, and writer based in Guatemala, received the Award to conduct research into the aesthetic legacy of the Garifuna population in relation to their colonial history. REPORT 2019 ICI/CPPC TRAVEL AWARD
Pablo José Ramírez Garifunas communities, exiled and anti-colonial resilience
Overview of Livingston, Image: Pablo José Ramírez
The history of the Garifuna has been unique, not just exemplary of the complexities of the histories of racialization in Central America and the Caribbean, but one that remains a vibrant testimony of a dignifying creative resistance that shares as many bonds with the African diaspora as it does with the local indigenous population.
I began my travels where the first Garifuna settlement happened after exile (Roatan, Honduras), ending in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, where the story of Garifuna resistance begins. During the trips, two strategies guided my approach to Garifuna culture: long open conversations with key cultural actors, and the quasi archaeological work of finding traces of visual and performative culture, which encrypts and holds collective memory. The history of the Garifuna people is deeply entangled with the colonial memory of deterritorialization, with the constant idea of an ancient home being far away. These forms of memory are encrypted in visual, performative and spiritual practices that
Hotel Henri Bergson, Livingston, August 2019. Image: Pablo José Ramírez
serve as strategies of survival. I tried to hold most of the meetings in places where the work of the people was actually taking place, including in restaurants or during dance practice, as happened with the Garifuna ballet in Tegucigalpa.
possible axes of inquiry are still to be discovered. For instance, one of the unexplored aspects is the Garifuna history is its diaspora in the United States. I was surprised to learn that more than 80,000 Garifuna currently live in the Bronx, for example. The ICI/CPPC Award allowed me to do the fieldwork that will lead to further research, essays or curatorial projects that can articulate a history of colonial resilience and resistance that manifests itself through a vibrant culture.
Murals at hotel Henri Bergson walls, Livingston, August 2019. Image: Pablo José Ramírez
These travels couldn’t result in a final statement around Garifuna culture, but more of an approach where different Since receiving the ICI/CPPC Travel Award, Pablo José Ramírez was named Adjunct Curator, First Nations and Indigenous Art, at Tate Modern. He is based in Guatemala.
This text is an excerpt of Ramírez’s travel report. Read the full text on ICI’s website in the Research tab.
When connecting artists to one another and to an audience, curators create more than experiences. They build essential infrastructures—through exhibitions or art spaces and institutions—that foster local art scenes. In turn, by connecting curators from around the world to one another, ICI provides an international framework for knowledge-sharing within which art practices can further develop.
ICI is a unique organization that focuses on the role of the curator as a contextualizing force for contemporary art. Every year ICI presents over 60 programs— exhibitions, events, publications, research and training opportunities for curators—in collaboration with art spaces in up to 20 countries around the world. Our partnerships have formed a network of collaborators that spreads across all 50 U.S. states and to over 70 countries.
