Photo: Bruce Ferguson
Bruce W. Ferguson is an independent curator and critic who has worked internationally for more than thirty years. “I have spent most of my professional life in one way or another facilitating artists,” Ferguson says, and in fact, he is recognized as having identified many of the top contemporary artists in early stages of their careers.
His recent projects include planning for a new institute for media, arts and culture at Arizona State University in Phoenix and consulting on exhibitions to the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. He served formerly as as the Dean, School of Arts at Colombia University, as President and Executive Director of the New York Academy of Art, and is the founding Director and first biennial curator of SITE Santa Fe, in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Ferguson has curated more than 35 exhibitions for institutions such as the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen, the Barbican Art Gallery in London, the Winnipeg and Vancouver Art Galleries in Canada, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. He also organized exhibitions in the international biennales of Sao Paulo, Sydney, Venice, and Istanbul.
As a curator, Ferguson is interested in audiences: “There has been a whole shift in the museum world, and in the university, from the idea of supply-driven toward demand-driven programming,” he says. “It used to be that curators just made exhibitions that reflected their interests. But now, increasingly, you have to ask – does anybody want it or need it? There has to be some relationship to the community and to the local.”
A prolific writer, Ferguson has written for art publications like Canadian Art, Art Forum, Art in America, Art + Text, Flash Art, Bomb Magazine, Art Press, Border Crossings, and Parachute. He was the curator and co-writer for Table at the Imperial, a 60 minute radio play for the CBC Radio Drama Series Playing for Keeps #7 and was awarded a Senior Canada Council Grant in Criticism for writing. Along with Reesa Greenberg and Sandy Nairne, he edited a seminal anthology of essays on the theories of exhibitions, titled Thinking About Exhibitions (Routledge: 1996).
Symposium C6 runs concurrent with 