curatorial

WORLD'S GREATEST FREEDOM SHOW is a collaborative virtual exhibition on Omeka  developed for the Jackson Park Project. It is part of the MMSt program. Launches March, 2025.
  • In 1967, the wildly popular Emancipation Day celebration in Windsor, Ontario, dubbed the World’s Greatest Freedom Show, was abruptly cancelled. Launched in 1931 and drawing over 300,000 visitors from the US and Ontario, this massive annual event celebrated Black emancipation following the British Slavery Abolition Act (1834). The Freedom Show upheld the promise of progress in Human Civil Rights in Canada. However, just a month before the planned 1967 celebration, race riots broke out across the river in Detroit. Authorities, fearful of the spread of violence into Canada, forced the show’s cancellation.

TEAPOTS, Steeped in History was a collaborative virtual exhibition developed for the MMSt program. 
  • The teapots from China, Japan and England in this virtual exhibition are presented as metaphors of shifting historical global powers – injustice, socio-political, cultural, and economic inequities. This interpretive approach disrupts the visitor’s expectations of a linear ‘teapot history’. It is hard to imagine that teapots are part of a darker history. And yet, tea culture in the west became a lucrative opportunity for colonial powers and corporate empires to advance global ambitions. 
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Exhibitions are collaborative endeavours. Content experts,  interpretive planners, writers, editors, designers, photographers, and installation crew work together in the fulfillment of a museum's mission. In my early curatorial work and writing, I employed a traditional art historical lens: formal innovation in the artwork of a single artist. 

In my current curatorial work, a social justice lens reframes artworks/items through meaningful contemporary issues.  From Big Idea to selection of genre for public facing texts, an exhibition answers the viewer's question, "so what?" with ideas and information relevant to their personal experiences. 

I have curated both in person and virtual exhibitions. For grass roots, community based initiatives, digital exhibitions and archives offer a means of reaching a wide audience at a low cost. The online museum experience -- whether a representation of a physical exhibition or a born-digital artwork -- is part of an institution's overall media strategy.