Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker

South Building Lecture Hall, Room 301

Emily Carr continues its Speaker Series with Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, Director of the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, in an exciting conversation with Sadira Rodrigues, an independent curator and Director of Emily Carr Continuing Studies.

Since 2009, Birnie Danzker has been developing an innovative program in conjunction with Tim Rollins and K.O.S.: A History. Entitled “The Seattle Project,” it is a series of collaborative exhibitions and projects commissioned by the Frye to celebrate the Museum’s 58-year-old commitment to community outreach and art education. Rodrigues and Birnie Danzker will discuss this project and the shift in Birnie Danzker’s curatorial thinking as she approaches her new role at the Frye Museum. They will also discuss her curatorial process — exploring both the conceptual and practical considerations of curating.

Beginning in the 1970s, Birnie Danzker’s curatorial projects have dealt explicitly with the political dimension of cultural production. She has curated numerous exhibitions on both historical and contemporary art with a special emphasis on the history of the Modern. Some examples include The Avant Garde and the Ukraine (1993), The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994 (2000) with Okwui Enwezor, and Shanghai Modern (2004) with Ken Lum and Zhengtian Sheng.

Birnie Danzker served as curator, then director, of the Vancouver Art Gallery in the 1980s before leaving for Munich, where she directed the Villa Stuck for 15 years. Her exhibitions have earned critical acclaim at the International Center of Photography in New York (1980), Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art and P.S. 1 MoMA (2002), and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2005).

Each semester, Emily Carr’s Speaker Series brings to campus the unique and diverse perspectives of world-renowned artists, architects, designers, curators, scholars, and writers. Each speaker presents their work and invites the audience to participate in a critical discussion. The primary mission of the Speaker Series Program is to foster cross-disciplinary discussions around topical issues in contemporary art, design, and media.

Lectures are free and open to the public.