Curatorial Workshop with Center Space Project

Center Space Project is currently accepting submissions from UT students for their annual open call for exhibition proposals! Are you interested in applying, but not sure where to begin? Join us for this workshop and panel discussion to learn more about the many steps involved in planning an exhibition, from crafting a strong exhibition narrative to preparing a budget. VAC Curatorial Fellow Donato Loia will moderate a panel of former Center Space curators—Sarah Stellman, riel Sturchio, and Lilia Rocio Taboada—who will share advice on how to prepare a strong proposal and offer insights into the process of realizing an exhibition. The panel discussion will be followed by a Q&A where attendees are invited to ask questions of the panelists.

Center Space Project's annual call for proposals will be open through April 11, 2021. All undergraduate and graduate students at The University of Texas at Austin are invited to submit proposals for the Visual Arts Center’s 2021–22 exhibition season. Learn more →

Bios

Donato Loia is a PhD Candidate in Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Texas at Austin and the 2020–2021 Curatorial Fellow at the Visual Arts Center. Previously, he was the 2019-2020 Vivian L. Smith Fellow at the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas. During the summer of 2019, he received a Short-Term Research Grant sponsored by the German Academy Exchange Service (DAAD) and was a visiting scholar at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne, Germany. In 2012, he received a master’s degree in Modern and Contemporary Art from the University of Rome, La Sapienza. After the completion of his master’s degree, he was granted the Leonardo Fellowship and worked for one year with the curatorial department of the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art in the UK. His work has appeared in Visual Studies, Studies in Philosophy and Education, Mise-en-Scène: The Journal of Film and Visual Narration, among other journals. From 2006-2015, he has been a musician and toured extensively in Europe.

Sarah Stellman lives and works in Austin, Texas. She received her BFA in Studio Art with a minor in Art History at The University of Texas at Austin in Fall 2020. She is currently a fellow at the Riso Room in the Department of Art and Art History. Her work was included in the 2020 UT Art and Art History Research Week Exhibition.

riel Sturchio is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice often utilizes photography and its extensions. Sturchio uses their experiences as a queer, non-binary, chronically ill artist to provoke, and criticize socially idealized normative fantasies of beauty, ability, and gender identity. They pair their academic background in critical queer phenomenology, bodily disorientation, and affect to explore the sculptural tactility of sound, the mediation of distance through varieties of touch, and the value of bodily awareness. They are interested in how their body is forced into disorientation through disease and use this perspective as a foundation for evoking affect through their work.

Lilia Rocio Taboada is a curator and arts writer based in New York, NY. She currently works as Joint Curatorial Fellow between The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Museum of Modern Art, Department of Media & Performance. Prior to her Fellowship, she earned her MA in 2019 from the Department of Art History at the University of Texas at Austin and has previously held positions at arts institutions in Austin, New York, and Los Angeles. While attending UT, Taboada curated the exhibition Sula Bermudez-Silverman: Sutures at the Visual Arts Center through Center Space Project and was the recipient of a 2017-18 Graduate School Mentoring Fellowship.