Jenifer Papararo, the director and curator of the Art Gallery of York University (AGYU), is the featured speaker for the 2020 Goldfarb Lecture in Visual Arts presented by York’s School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design (AMPD). The lecture will take place Feb. 5 starting a 5 p.m. in room 312, Joan & Martin Goldfarb Centre for Fine Arts.
In her presentation titled, “No Nowhere,” Papararo will speak about her work as a curator of contemporary art. Her remarks will also cover her interest in locating art and exhibitions as situations tethered to place and shared experience. She will discuss institutional knowledge as developed by the artists she works with, harnessing their approaches to redefine the presumed safety net of museums and galleries that ubiquitously function to be any-place, any-where, any-time. Papararo considers the impossibility of this nowhere.
Recently appointed the director and curator at the AGYU, Papararo began her tenure in 2020. She comes to the AGYU, from Plug Institute of Contemporary Art, Winnipeg, where she was the executive director. She was previously, the curator at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver and the program director at Mercer Union, Toronto. She has curated numerous solo and group exhibition.
Papararo initiated STAGES biennial in 2017 a temporary public art exhibition of sculpture and performance in Winnipeg, and recently curating the 2019 iteration, including Raymond Boisjoly, Daniel Buren, FASTWÜRMS, Kenneth Lavallee, Joar Nango, Andrea Roberts and Silke Otto-Knapp. In 2018 at Plug In ICA, she worked with Skeena Reece, DIS.art, BUSH gallery, Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa, Przemek Pyszczek, and co-curated the group exhibition Days of Reading: beyond this state of affairs.
She has written numerous curatorial texts and edited various exhibition related books: including My Best Thing by Frances Stark and the exhibition catalogue Enter the Landscape, which focuses on the female or queer body, its representation and relation to the land. Papararo is a founding member of the artist and curatorial collective Instant Coffee, whose work has been exhibited at One +J in Seoul, South Korea; the Vancouver Art Gallery; the Toronto Sculpture Garden; the Yerba Buena Center, San Francisco; Subvision, Hamburg; Encuentro Internacional, Medellín; Sparwasser HQ, Berlin; the Americas Society, New York; and the 2nd Tirana International Biennial, Albania and are represented by MKG 127, Toronto.
The Goldfarb Lecture in Visual Arts is made possible through the generous support of Joan and Martin Goldfarb, longstanding benefactors of York University’s Department of Visual Art and Art History and AMPD. This lecture is free to attend and all are welcome.
For more information on this event, email visarts@yorku.ca.