A warm welcome to CIMAM to Dr. Koan Jeff Baysa!

"My specific interests embrace provenance and conservation, especially of new media, and repatriation, particularly using new strategies and technologies. CIMAM is the best professional organisation within which to survey current research, ongoing challenges, and innovative solutions in these areas. With special interests in Native art, vernacular art, cultural artifacts and their makers, I welcome the collegiality of and exchanges with those with shared interests.”

“My other concerns include the roles of artists and their artworks serving activism that addresses social and environmental injustices; and investigating the intersections of medical sciences with contemporary and ancient cultures.”

Koan Jeff Baysa, medical doctor (Clinical Immunology Fellow, UCSF), writer and critic (AICA, the Association of International Art Critics), curator (Whitney Museum ISP Curatorial Fellow, and IKT, the International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art).

About Dr. Koan Jeff Baysa

Founder of the Honolulu Biennial, he is the Co-founder of the Joshua Treenial, a site-responsive event in the California high desert, and Creative Director of iB202X/iBiennale, a globally itinerant art summit. Invited as curatorial advisor for Congo Biennale in Democratic Republic of the Congo and Fresh Winds Biennale in Iceland, he also coordinated special projects for the Great Green Wall of Africa Foundation. Commissioned to curate a traveling exhibition of works from the Philippines diaspora, he also received a Ford Foundation grant to survey contemporary art in Vietnam. In addition to being on the boards of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics in Manhattan, and Art Omi in upstate NY, he assisted medical missions in Beirut and Bosnia. Through his medical clinic in TriBeCa, New York City, he provided health care at cost for medically uninsured artists. He has lectured at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, The Phillips Collection and The National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC. Born and raised in Hawai'i, Dr. Baysa is based in Los Angeles with regular periods in Hawai’i and New York.

About CIMAM

CIMAM – International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art – is an Affiliated Organization of ICOM.* Founded in 1962, CIMAM’s vision is a world where the contribution of museums, collections, and archives of modern and contemporary art to the cultural, social, and economic well-being of society is recognized and respected.

Join today, and take part in our network with over 700 contemporary art museum professionals from 84 countries.

Thank you, Dr. Koan Jeff Baysa, for becoming a member of CIMAM!