Where I Find Myself: Labyrinthine Walking in Place
As part of my curatorial practice at the Spencer Museum of Art, I have consistently walked Janine Antoni’s work, here-ing, sometimes as often as weekly, for nearly two years. I asked the artist to give me instructions or exercises to keep in mind on some of my walks in preparation for this talk. The presentation is a reflection on walking with the artist’s direction. It also examines how the artist’s commitment to walking as an embodied form of making has shaped my understanding of my work as a curator and research facilitator at an academic art space.
Joey Orr is the Mellon Curator at the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas, where he directs Arts Research Integration and is affiliate faculty in Museum Studies and Visual Art. Previously he served as the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where his major curatorial project aligned three exhibitions around artistic research. Recent writing has been published in Art Papers, Art Journal Open, BOMB, Hyperallergic, Journal for Artistic Research (Network Reflections), and Sculpture. Juried writing has been published by Antennae; Art & the Public Sphere; Emotion, Space, and Society; Images; Journal of American Studies; Leonardo; QED; Visual Methodologies; and a chapter in the volume Rhetoric, Social Value, and the Arts (Palgrave Macmillan). His first book, A Sourcebook of Performance Labor, was released by Routledge Press in 2023. He holds an MA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a PhD from Emory University and currently serves as a contributing editor for Art Papers.