Expanding Internationalism - A Conference on ... - Mary Jane Jacob

INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITIONS TODAY
What contribution do international exhibitions make to
today's contemporary art scene
Moderator:
Panelists:
Lynn Gumpert, USA
Laszlo Beke, Hungary
Lynne Cooke, Great Britain
Helen Escobedo, M2xico
Dawson MUnjeri, Zimbabwe
Fumio Nanjo, Japan
Lars Nittve, Sweden
Maria Elena Ramos, Venezuela
Tom Sokolowski, USA
Ryszard Stanislawski, Poland
The discussion opened with a question as to how international
exhibitions are organized.
One very traditional approach has been to send
a curator to a foreign country -- and often, culture -- to select a show
based on research conducted during one or two visits. Usually these
exhibitions are organized through official connections, i.e. government
agencies.
One alternative was addressed by Tom Sokolowski who briefly
talked about his involvement with "Against Nature," an exarrple of a
"team-curated" exhibition, which drew together American and Japanese
curators to jointly organize an exhibition of contemporary Japanese
artists for the U.S.
This project took four years of traveling back and
forth between the U.S. and Japan.
They also decided to focus on only one
aspect of the current scene rather than a survey, in this case, younger
artists who were coming to grips with the contemporary mixture of the East
and West today in Jap~.
Fumio Nanjo noted that this project began when
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