Exhibition: “Negotiating Grids”

Negotiating Grids at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, July 8, 2022–December 31, 2022. Photography by Adrian Cubillas, courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Installation view featuring works by Jim Campbell and John Preus, with exhibition graphic by Will Hodgson.

Negotiating Grids is my second curatorial project—and solo curatorial debut—at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA).

The exhibition examines the use of grids in contemporary art and life. Featuring eight artworks acquired by PAFA over the last six years, Negotiating Grids highlights how artists continue a long-standing examination of these structures in art history, urban planning, and social infrastructures, in addition to more novel considerations of grids in digital space.

Nina Chanel Abney and Jim Campbell respond to the grids of digital infrastructures, both the frenetic speed of information parceled by screens and the abstraction of digital content through pixels. Tim McFarlane and Isaac Tin Wei Lin approach graffiti mark-making as gestures that transform the streamlined architecture of the city into a more dynamic stage for negotiating memory and belonging. Arghavan Khosravi and Timothy Curtis use the stacked perspective of palaces in Persian miniature paintings and the visual grid, respectively, to meditate on power. John Preus directly references the supportive role of grids through his sculpture while also grappling with the failings of education infrastructures. And Louise Fishman subverts the rigidity of the grid through improvisational marks that transform her abstract composition into a kind of window, perhaps from the Venetian hotel and restaurant cited in the work’s title. Using the grid and related visual structures as points of departure, these artists collectively examine how order, power, and belonging are defined within, or outside of, these structures.

You can find a provisional bibliography for the exhibition concept here.