Other Traditions in Criticism and Curating 

Floor 3 Theater and Online, via Zoom

Join us for a conversation inspired by the work of the critic and curator Gene Swenson, a pivotal figure in the exhibition Sixties Surreal. Convened by Jennifer Sichel, author of Criticism Without Authority: Gene Swenson's and Jill Johnston's Queer Practices (2025), the panel brings together scholars and curators Sampada Aranke, Julia Bryan-Wilson, and Josh T. Franco to consider Swenson’s interventions into art history in the 1960s and the alternate genealogies of critical and curatorial practice that they might engender.   

During the month of February in 1968, Swenson picketed alone outside the Museum of Modern Art wielding only a giant question mark. Amid a period of profound social and political upheaval, Swenson put his body on the line to ask: What if the gatekeepers of modernist abstraction no longer held sway over New York’s art world? What could our institutions become? What would our artists produce?  

Using Swenson’s unanswered questions as a provocation, this panel explores other traditions of criticism and curating that emerged from the 1960s. What did it mean to reject modernist appeals to purity and coherence, and refuse to cordon the intensity of social and political life off from one’s work? How did criticism and curating change in response to other demands and commitments? 

SPEAKERS 

Sampada Aranke is an Associate Professor of Art History and Comparative Studies at Ohio State University. Her research interests include performance theories of embodiment, visual culture, and black cultural and aesthetic theory. Her work has been published in e-flux, Artforum, Art Journal, ASAP/J, and October and she is the author of Death’s Futurity: The Visual Life of Black Power (2023). 

Julia Bryan-Wilson is a Professor of Contemporary Art and LGBTQ+ Studies at Columbia University, and Curator-at-Large at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP). She co-curated the exhibition Lotty Rosenfeld: Disobedient Spaces at the Wallach Art Gallery. 

Josh T. Franco is an artist and art historian from West Texas. He is Collector at Large at the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art. He recently co-curated the exhibition Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Always to Return that took place in Washington D.C.   

Jennifer Sichel is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory at the University of Louisville, Hite Institute of Art and Design. She is the author of Criticism Without Authority: Gene Swenson's and Jill Johnston's Queer Practices (2025).