This podcast conversation centers on the exciting new role of the offshoot to the non-profit Providence Biennial, called Providence Curates: Cultivating a Transformative Experience. We are excited to propose interpreting art through activist curating in various forms and formats. The topic of our podcast—addressing our art curating initiative as a meaningful act of engagement with social and environmental justice commitments—is  consonant with Trending Globally’s social sciences approach. The wide-ranging podcast conversation is directed towards a diversity of publics, ethnicities and backgrounds we seek to encompass. It features two new members of the non-profit, artist Spencer Evans (also a RISD professor) and gallerist Jonny Skye (Skye Gallery on Providence’s west side), with Melaine Ferdinand-King, an advanced doctoral student in Africana Studies at Brown University.

Providence Curate‘s goal is to enable considered, thoughtful practice for art exhibitions, especially featuring themes about which emerging curators, whom we intend to mentor, are passionate, as are we. The capital city’s legacy of art experimentation in diverse, distinctive public settings perseveres in our project. Yet we act in a different moment, a challenging period  where art may be experienced directly and physically, or virtually, or in some hybrid mode.

We are mindful of cultural shifts, and the messages we convey to audiences through relationships of object selection and exhibition, installation or intervention across diverse venues. Through our creative curatorial practice we intend to explore contemporary art afresh with our emerging curators, and to privilege the critical thinking that artists generate as we move ahead into the After-Times.