Art is Good for You: Perspectives on Museums and Well-being
Art is Good for You: Perspectives on Museums and Well-being
Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic across the world, museums have become increasingly recognised for the role they can play in addressing physical, mental and social well-being. Join artists, curators and educators from Asia, the Pacific, Central and South America talking about how notions of well-being are informing their practices and how they are shaping the museum and its many publics.
Invited speakers
- Gill Nicol, Director of Audience Engagement, Learning, Public Programs, Marketing&Comms and Visitor Experience, MCA Australia, Sydney, Australia
- Alfredo Aracil, Head of Community Engagement, Department of Education, at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina
- Jessica Gogan, Independent Curator and educator, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
- Sofía Olascoaga, Independent educator, artist, and researcher. Member of Sistema Nacional de Creadores Artísticos, in Mexico, in Experimental Practices (2019-22) to develop the project The Nurturer: Cooking to Learn (La Nutridora: Una cocina para aprender).
- Lee Mingwei, Artist, Paris, France and New York, USA
Moderated by CIMAM Board Member, Suzanne Cotter, Director, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. With the support of CIMAM Board Members Victoria Noorthoorn, Director, Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, and Rhana Devenport, Director, Art Gallery of South Australia.
CIMAM 2022 Rapid Response Webinars are made possible with the support from the Getty Foundation through its Connecting Professionals/Sharing Expertise initiative.
Biographies
- Gill Nicol
Gill Nicol joined the MCA in August 2015 as Director of Audience Engagement, covering Learning, Public Programs, Marketing&Comms and Visitor Experience. Originally trained as an artist, Gill worked for over 30 years with contemporary art and audiences across the UK.
Across the last 7 years, her focus for the MCA has been to embed a culture of research and reflection, to fully understand the impact of all the many programs in place that connect different audiences with contemporary art - from Early Learning through to those with dementia and their care-partners.
She is driven to make contemporary art accessible, in as many ways as possible, and for as many people as possible. Gill was granted a Distinguished Talent visa in December 2019 to enable her to continue this work.
- Alfredo Aracil
Alfredo Aracil has been Head of Community Engagement, Department of Education, at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires since 2021. He holds an MA in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and the Museo Reina Sofía. In 2017, he won the contest organised by the Autonomous Community of Madrid with an artistic research into the poetics and politics of mental health presented at Sala de Arte Joven. This project has been continued in 2018 in the public programme “Una fuerza posible” [A Possible Force] at the Museo Reina Sofía. Since 2019, Aracil has been part of the Scientific Committee of Athamas, Art and Anti-psychiatry, a research group supported by the INHA, Paris. He has curated exhibitions and public programmes at the Museo Reina Sofía and LABoral Centro de Arte in Gijón. Alfredo has been living and working in Buenos Aires since 2017.
- Jessica Gogan
Jessica Gogan is a curator, researcher and educator based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and director of Instituto MESA and co-editor of Revista MESA
http://institutomesa.org/RevistaMesa/edicoes_en.html. Her research and projects explore the practices and intersections of art, care, and pedagogy and experiment with non-exhibition based, collaborative and collective curatorship. She is a collaborating professor and postdoctoral fellow in the Postgraduate Program in Contemporary Studies of the Arts at Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil. She holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Pittsburgh (2016) and was formerly curator of special projects and director of education at The Andy Warhol Museum.
- Sofía Olascoaga
Sofía Olascoaga’s practice is focused on the intersections of art and education, through the exploration of encounters, think tanks, and public programs along with artists, theorists, curators, and educators, and with a wide range of institutional and independent interlocutors.
Olascoaga was co-curator of the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo Incerteza Viva; Academic Curator at MUAC (Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo – UNAM) in Mexico City, 2014; research curatorial fellow at Independent Curators International, 2011; and Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program, 2010. She received her BFA with honors from La Esmeralda National School of Fine Arts. In 2012, she was workshop clinics director at the International Symposium of Contemporary Art Theory and, from 2007 to 2010, head of education and public programs at Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, both in Mexico City. Sofia is a member of Another Roadmap for Arts Education, of Red de Conceptualismos del Sur, and has contributed to specific events with the network Arts Collaboratory.
Her long-term research project, Between Utopia and Disenchantment (Entre utopía y desencanto), focuses on the collective memory and genealogies stemming from intentional community models developed in Mexico in past decades, addressing the ideas posed by Ivan Illich and its influential role in the practice of many Mexican and international thinkers.
She is currently member of Sistema Nacional de Creadores Artísticos, 2019-2022 in Mexico, in Experimental Practices (2019-22) to develop the project The Nurturer: Cooking to Learn (La Nutridora: Una cocina para aprender).
- Lee Mingwei
Lee Mingwei creates participatory installations, where strangers can explore issues of trust, intimacy, and self-awareness, and one-on-one events. Lee's projects are often open-ended scenarios for everyday interaction, and take on different forms with the involvement of participants and change during the course of an exhibition. Born in Taiwan in 1964 and currently living in Paris and New York City, Lee received an MFA from Yale University in 1997, and has held solo exhibitions at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, Mori Art Museum, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art and has been featured in biennals in Venice, Lyon, Liverpool, Taipei, Sydney, Whitney, and Asia Pacific Triennials. Lee's mid-career survey exhibition "Lee Mingwei and His Relations: The Art of Participation", curated by Mami Kataoka, was presented at Mori Art Museum (2014), Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2015), and Auckland Art Gallery (2016). He participated in the 57th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia, "Viva Arte Viva," curated by Christine Macel. His European survey exhibition "Lee Mingwei: Li, Gifts and Rituals" was on view at Gropius Bau (2020) and Museum Villa Stuck (2021), and he is presenting Our Labyrinth (2015-present) at Tate Modern in May-June 2022.
Thursday 15 September 2022, 14:00 hrs CEST.
Click here to register.
Duration: 1h and 30 minutes (45 minutes of presentations followed by another 45 minutes of Q&A).
Rapid Response Webinars are free of cost for CIMAM members.
Non-Members can attend paying 10,00€ that will be deducted from their membership fee if they join CIMAM in the next 3 months.
→ The preferred payment method is PayPal invitations (with a credit card) which consist of receiving a link to easily pay without having a PayPal account.
This session will be recorded and posted at CIMAM’s Only Members section. We may use still images of the recording for CIMAM’s promotional purposes. If you’d rather not appear on that snapshot, please let us know in advance.
About CIMAM’s Rapid Response Webinars
Started in 2020, CIMAM has taken the new virtual scenario as an opportunity to launch a series of online activities exclusively for our community to, now more than ever, reinforce the sense of connectivity through online meetings in a peer to peer environment to share, learn, and be inspired by the experiences of other CIMAM professionals.
For 2022, we have prepared a series of online sessions that will take place, nearly every month of the year. The next one is:
- Thursday 29 September, 14:00 hrs. CEST: Towards a Shared Future: Indigenous Artists + Non-Indigenous Institutions. Webinar proposed and designed by CIMAM member Georgiana Uhlyarik, Curator, Canadian Art, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada.