10 Years of Curator in Residence

20 September, 2022 at 6pm

Through the Curator in Residence (CIR) program, audiences are inspired by viewing local, national, and international work in their region and the arts community establishes new connections throughout the world. 

The CIR program began in 2011 and was the first of its kind in the region, creating an opportunity for curators, often emerging in their careers, to program full seasons of exhibitions and programming in a striking and large exhibition space in the Pacific Northwest. In celebration of the catalog release for Lucy Cotter’s Season 10, we hosted a Zoom panel discussion with Rachel Adams (Season 4), Lucy Cotter (Season 10), Summer Guthery (Season 3), and Suzy Halajian (Season 8), moderated by Blake Shell, executive and artistic director of Oregon Contemporary. We had group chat reflecting on the CIR Program as the organization has grown and changed, and heard from the curators about their outstanding work in the field since curating for the program.

Rachel Adams is the Chief Curator and Director of Programs at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. Her areas of interest are varied but focus on creating meaningful connections for artists. Projects tend to include the crossover between contemporary art and architecture, as well as sound, performance, video and new media practices. Past curatorial appointments include Senior Curator at UB Art Galleries, Curator-in-Residence at Disjecta Contemporary Art Center (now Oregon Contemporary) and Associate Curator at Arthouse at the Jones Center (now The Contemporary Austin). Adams holds an MA in Exhibition and Museum Studies from SFAI and a BFA from SAIC. Select exhibitions include Maya Dunietz: Root of Two, All Together, Amongst Many: Reflections on Empathy, Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Drop Scene, Claudia Wieser: Generations (co-curated), Alison O’Daniel: Heavy Air, Jillian Mayer: TIMESHARE, The Language of Objects, Wanderlust: Actions, Traces, Journeys 1967-2017 and Introducing Tony Conrad: A Retrospective (co-curated). Forthcoming projects include exhibitions with Jennifer Ling Datchuk, Raven Halfmoon and the group exhibition Presence in the Pause: Interiority and its Radical Immanence.

Lucy Cotter’s multidisciplinary practice engages with art as a site of knowledge and socio-cultural transformation. She was curator of the Dutch Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2017, and is author-editor of Reclaiming Artistic Research (2019). Irish born, she is currently based in Portland, Oregon.  

Summer Guthery is the Artistic Director of Canal Projects, a new non-profit organization opening in New York City’s Soho neighborhood in the Fall of 2022. Prior to this she was the Director of JOAN, a not-for-profit exhibition space focusing on emerging and underrepresented artists and the Curator of Performance and Public Programming at LAXART in Los Angeles. In 2013 & 2011 she was the Assistant Curator of Performa Biennial 2013 & 2011. Her writing can be seen in Frieze, Artforum, ArtReview, and Art in America.  Guthery received an M.A. from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

Suzy Halajian is a curator and writer based in Los Angeles. Since June 2022, she is Executive Director and Chief Curator at JOAN. Her work begins at the intersection of art and politics, treating image making as steeped in colonial pasts and modern surveillance states. Her research interests center on the legacies of trauma and conflict in experimental moving and performance practices from the Middle East and North Africa and their diaspora. She has curated exhibitions and programs at spaces including Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, Hammer Museum, Human Resources, (all Los Angeles); Oregon Contemporary, Portland; Kunstverein, Amsterdam; Sursock Museum, Beirut; and UKS, Oslo. Halajian serves on the Programming Committee of Human Resources Los Angeles. She was granted The Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for the collaborative journal Georgia, and a Curatorial Research Fellowship from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Her writing has been published by ArtEast, BOMB, X-TRA, Ibraaz, among others. Halajian holds an MA in Curatorial Studies from Bard College in New York, and is a PhD candidate in the Film and Digital Media program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.