Curators Marina Chao & Adam Ryan on Curation and Community Engagement

Curators Marina Chao & Adam Ryan (CPW) join PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf to discuss the inaugural Upstate Photography Biennial and the curatorial process behind this major contemporary photography exhibition. Chao, Ryan, and Wolf explore how CPW develops exhibitions with both the local community and broader audience in mind, building meaningful public engagement, and what artists can do to establish and sustain relationships with photography and arts organizations.

https://cpw.org

Marina Chao has previously held curatorial positions at the International Center of Photography and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. As assistant curator at ICP she organized the exhibition Multiply, Identify, Her (2018) and contributed to the publication Public, Private, Secret: On Photography and the Configuration of Self (Aperture and ICP, 2018). She was awarded a 2019 Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for a project exploring the intersections of image, language, and technology.

Adam Ryan is a photography specialist and curator based in Poughkeepsie, New York. He gained experience working at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where he focused on the museum’s permanent collection of photographs, while also managing its Collection Study Center. He collaborated on multiple exhibitions such as Japanese Photography from Post War to Now, Selections from the Sack Photographic Trust, and Nothing Stable Under Heaven. Before that, he worked in the Photography Department of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where his primary focus was a major retrospective on the work of renowned artist Duane Michals – Storyteller: The Photographs of Duane Michals. As a student, he learned photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology and continued into graduate school at Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto, Canada.

https://www.adamgilesryan.com