Curation
Presented at Atlanta Contemporary
Sept 18, 2021 - Jan 9, 2022
Artist-collector Lucinda Bunnen is a powerhouse in Atlanta photography. She has spent the last fifty years creating exquisite artworks infused with the magic, wonder, fear, and mystery of being alive. Grant curates Inward, Outward, Forward, a solo exhibition that showcases the artist’s wide-ranging use of photography and highlights her contributions to Atlanta’s art community through philanthropic work with a selection of works by other artists in her personal art collection.
Co-curated by Nadine Weitlisbach and Allison Grant
with accompanying catalog
Presented at:
Photoforum Pasquart, Beil, Switzerland, Sept 22 – Nov 19, 2017
Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL, Oct 12 – Dec 22, 2107
Exhibited Artists: Barbara Davatz, Zackary Drucker & Rhys Ernst, Jess T. Dugan, Alexandre Haefeli, Leonard Suryajaya, Laurence Rasti, Lorenzo Triburgo
Disruptive Perspectives is an exhibition that explores gender, sexuality, and identity. The artists included use photography to articulate an expansive range of identities that cannot be sufficiently characterized using simplistic binaries. Rather than rendering identity as fixed, the works on view consider gender and sexuality as negotiations that are shaped by the human psyche, the passage of time, and the complex relationship between self and other.
Presented at Filter Space
Chicago, IL
May 8 – June 27, 2015
Exhibited Artists: Eli Craven, April Friges, Jeroen Nelemans, and John Steck Jr.
The four artists reuse existing photographic material to create artworks about how the meaning of pictures drift and change over time. Employing unique processes ranging from minor interventions to outright transformation, each artist meditates on how photographs seen “from now” often haunt and fascinate us by connecting with traces of the past.
Image Credit: Eli Craven, Naive Object #2
Solo exhibition presented at the Museum of Contemporary Photography
Chicago, IL
Jan 26 -Mar 22, 2015
Commissioned by MoCP in partnership with the Goethe Institutes of Chicago and Sarajevo, organized by Allison Grant
When the Katja Stuke and Oliver Sieber first visited Chicago in 2013 to work on a different project, they found that the city called forward memories of the Sieber family’s former housekeeper, Indira, a Bosnian-born immigrant who lived in Düsseldorf from 1992 to 1999 before moving to Chicago and subsequently falling out of touch. Sieber and Stuke left Chicago with a new interest in investigating Indira’s background and story. She immigrated to Germany from Bosnia during the Bosnian War and was unable to return to her homeland. Indira eventually moved to Chicago because she was facing deportation and began a new life in the United States. Sieber and Stuke were able to locate Indira on Facebook and they are now tracing her history as it intersects with issues of diaspora, home, social status, and the formation of identity, political protest, and family. Photographs taken in Germany, Bosnia and the United States will comprise the final project, along with family photographs and ephemera from Sieber’s and Stuke's personal archive.
Presented at the Museum of Contemporary Photography
Chicago, IL
January 26 -March 22, 2015
Exhibited artists: Barbara Diener, Pao Houa Her, Jon Rafman, Lieko Shiga
Examining displacement as one of the most unsettling of human experiences, the exhibition What Remainsfeatures four contemporary artists who contend with the psychic and physical aftermath of dislocation. In photography and video projects, these artists suture memories into their present narratives, expressing their individualized experiences of living with a fractured identity—one that must encompass geographies and cultures separated by space and time in one unified self. Inherent in each artist’s process is a search for continuity. Therefore, their work simultaneously considers both personal backstory and the social geography of the communities, subcultures, or families in which they currently live. Negotiating parallel worlds, these artists metaphorically inhabit a multiplicity of places that could never coexist in reality, but which find expression in photographic representation.
Presented at the Museum of Contemporary Photography
Chicago, IL
April 12 – July 3, 2013
Exhibited artists: Roderick Buchanan, Ewan Gibbs, Jack Goldstein, Michelle Grabner, Julie Henry, Brett Kashmere, Vesna Pavlović, Paul Pfeiffer, Susken Rosenthal, Katja Stuke, Charlie White
Spectator Sports explores the relationship between athlete and spectator with a particular focus on the spectator’s perspective. Each artist whose work is included in the exhibition demonstrates an interest in the unique and deeply engaging combination of drama, spontaneity, and spectacle that distinguishes sports from most other forms of popular entertainment. In diverse ways, the artists examine how spectators align their identity with a protagonist or team and take in the twists of fate, spikes of excitement, and human feats that unfold moment by moment in sport. Some artists also consider photography and video as mediums that abstract our sense of space, time, and the human body even as photographic imagery causes us to feel closer to the real. Ultimately, the exhibition pivots on the sensation that we are directly involved with the athletes and teams that we root for—and we are thus connected to their rise and fall. The works included investigate how and why fans form rituals, allegiances, and communities centered on the performance of athletes that they do not personally know and sporting events that they cannot directly influence or control, and they enable us to probe the pleasures and disappointments associated with such affiliations.
Presented at the Museum of Contemporary Photography
Chicago, IL
July 13 – September 30, 2012
Co-curated by the staff at MoCP
Exhibited artists: Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin, Veronica Corzo-Duchardt, Nicolas Krebs & Taiyo Onorato, Liz Magic Laser, Object Orange, Harry Shearer, Martin Hyers & William Mebane, Michael Mergen, Doug Rickard
As we debate our country’s economic and political course in this election year, Peripheral Views: States of America brings together artists grappling with the difficulty of picturing the United States in our time. Authoritative imagies and grand narratives give way to malleable viewpoints in this exhibition, with each artist using photography as a means to take measure of our bearings and locate certain markers—past, present, and future—within the American Dream. By using diverse and fragmented images of America as barometers of the social climate, might we create a larger view of the state of this nation? Through closely focusing on the everyday objects, places, and images of the present and immediate past, can latent hopes and desires for an America full of opportunity be revealed?
Presented at the Museum of Contemporary Photography
Chicago, IL
July 29 – October 16, 2011
Exhibited artists: Jenny Åkerlund, Julia Büttelmann, Alison Carey, Eric William Carroll, Michelle Ceja, Ken Fandell, Jason Lazarus, Aspen Mays, Scott McFarland, Patricia Piccinini, Mark Ruwedel, Jennifer Ray, Alison Ruttan, SEMICONDUCTOR, Rachel Sussman, Penelope Umbrico
The exhibition Our Origins considers the human inclination to trace our beginnings beyond recorded history and explores our limited capacity to draw conclusive answers about the meaning of life. Sixteen participating contemporary artists use photography, video, drawing, and sculpture to reflect on natural history from a distinctly human and often humorous point of view. This approach emphasizes questions about the paradoxical nature of human intelligence in a universe that cannot be altogether explained. Where did we come from? How is it that we have come to possess a consciousness and a psyche? What does the future hold? The exhibition does not provide explicit answers to the great, mysterious questions of our universe, but rather confronts, and then ponders, the very idea that such questions might be unanswerable.