ICI (Independent Curators International)

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ICI (Independent Curators International)

ICI supports the work of curators to help create stronger art communities

Independent Curators International (ICI) supports curators to help create stronger art communities through experimentation, collaboration, and international engagement. Curators are arts community leaders and organizers who champion artistic practice; build essential infrastructures and institutions; and generate public engagement with art. We work with art spaces in the US and around the world to

present exhibitions and public programs for broad audiences; and professional development initiatives for curators. Our collaborative programs connect curators, artists, and audiences from across social, political, and cultural borders. They form an international framework for sharing knowledge and resources — promoting cultural exchange, access to art, and public awareness for the curator’s role.

06/12/2026

Actions for the Earth closes tomorrow , so this , we're celebrating the work of Zheng Bo!

In this installation, Zheng Bo invites interspecies connection through his Ecosensibility Exercises. These participatory actions are designed for anyone to perform in order to develop greater sensitivity and awareness of our interconnectedness with the natural world. In particular, Zheng prompts those of us living in industrialized and urban environments to bond with nature and slow down so that we may tune into our environment by becoming aware of movements, sensations, and conditions in our natural world. This includes mindful practices—for instance, the exercise of Drawing Weeds Practice brings the participant’s attention to the level of the plant, a moment of contemplation that also communes with nature.

As a member of the Wanwu Practice Group of “artists-scholars learning to live on Earth and contribute to its vibrancy,” Zheng continues to seek ways of understanding the more-than-human and the infinite possibilities of our relationships with plants.

06/11/2026

Last week, we visited with a group of SALA Members from and friends of ICI, and enjoyed a private tour of Julie Mehretu's exhibition "Our Days, Like a Shadow (a non-abiding hauntology)" led by Marian Goodman Gallery Partner Rose Lord. In this unique behind-the-scenes look, Rose offered insights into Mehretu's role as a civic leader and a champion of artists for over 20 years, how the business of the gallery works, and what it means to support artists in this context. She also discussed the exhibition, which featured new and distinct bodies of Mehretu's work from 2024-26, with a focus on abstraction as a vehicle of liberatory imagination and interweaving concepts around ephemerality and enlightenment.

Marian Goodman Gallery has been a steadfast partner of ICI, including through the Marian Goodman Gallery Initiative in honor of the late Okwui Enwezor (learn more on our website!), and Julie Mehretu is a long-standing collaborator who was recently honored at our 50th Anniversary Gala. It was an honor to share this experience with SALA and our communities!

Thank you to our hosts and to everyone who joined us. If you're interested in upcoming ICI patron events and ways to get involved, DM us or visit curatorsintl.org/support to learn more.

📷s: Laila Ann Marie Stevens ()

06/10/2026

Videos from the Curatorial Forum conference, "Mending Wall," are now available on our website!

"Mending Wall" takes its name from the 1914 Robert Frost poem to ask what it means to be a “good neighbor”—within and beyond the art institution, in the contexts of our personal relationships, and at national and global scales. It features a keynote lecture from independent curator and researcher (and Curatorial Intensive alum) Eszter Szakács () as well as two panel discussions with cultural practitioners. “Think Global” takes an international perspective, as panelists Oyindamola Faithful () and Marina Reyes Franco (.visitoreconomy) moderated by Megha Ralapati () consider what role our art institutions play in building networks of neighbors amid larger political dynamics. In “Act Local,” Katie Pfohl () and Daniel Tucker () think through the topic of neighborliness at the community level with moderator Ross Stanton Jordan ().

📷s: Clay Kerr,

06/09/2026

Elizabeth Diggon, Naomi Potter, and Shauna Thompson, the curators of “Like everything alive that we try to hold forever”, offer insights on the exhibition in an online curator talk hosted by FSU Museum of Fine Arts, where the exhibition is currently on view. Watch the full talk on our website!

“Like everything alive” brings together the work of Larry Achiampong & David Blandy, Diane Borsato, Stephanie Dinkins, Bridget Moser, Sondra Perry, and Miya Turnbull to reflect on ways that our human bodies exist in relation to non-human objects. Originally presented in 2023 at Esker Foundation in Calgary, Canada, and produced as a traveling exhibition by ICI, the exhibition’s first stop is FSU MoFA. The show will engage with each hosting art space through artworks that access the limits of human experience, push against it, or gesture toward a transhuman future.

06/05/2026

Actions for the Earth closes next week, so this , we're we're highlighting the work of Hylozoic/Desires, a multimedia performance duo made up of Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser. Their research "orbits around (non)place and history as a lens through which to look upon the multiple materialities of contemporary existence," and "use metaphor as an event, a force of attraction that holds otherwise distant entities together."

In Actions for the Earth, the duo's two videos study the forms of life and the ways that energy animates the world. In stills from their 3-channel video "As Grand As What," the artists reimagine the structure of the Sanskrit Kalachakra mandala, "a geomantic diagram in which the drawing, body, city, earth and universe mirror each other in a grand, cosmic architecture.” In the three-channel video installation "Bla," Himali Singh Soin appears as a masked figure whose purpose is to reconnect bla--the life energy that animates the world, according to Tibetan medicine--back into our bodies and recharge the anima (or life) of the planet.

📷s: Hylozoic/Desires (Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser), stills from As Grand As What, 2021, three-channel performance video; color, stereo sound. Installation views, Actions for the Earth, Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2026. (Photo: Krystal Ramirez)

06/04/2026

On June 25 in New York, we're celebrating the life and work of Joan Braderman (1948-2025) with "Make Art, Make Trouble," a full-day program that includes a screening of Braderman's feature-length documentary THE HERETICS, which traces the radical legacy of the Heresies Collective! The day also features a program of early feminist film and video, artist Q&As, and a panel discussion with members of Heresies on the ongoing impact of their collective action and resistance. A video artist, activist, pioneering voice of the feminist second wave, and a founding member of Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, Braderman was part of a generation of women who fundamentally transformed how art and politics could speak to one another.

The screening program, organized by Joan Braderman Archive and Abina Manning, brings together works of early feminist film and video by Braderman and her contemporaries, including Martha Rosler's 1975 "Semiotics of the Kitchen"; the experimental cinema turning point "Gently Down the Stream" by Su Friedrich (1982); "Diary of an African Nun" (1977), an early work by director Julie Dash; and several of Braderman's works, including "Joan Does Dynasty" (1986) and "30 Second Spot Reconsidered" (1986). See the full schedule of screenings and RSVP on our website!

06/02/2026

Actions for the Earth: Art, Care & Ecology closes in less than two weeks at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where it has enjoyed a rich presentation with many inclusions in the University curriculum. The Barrick has hosted multiple ICI traveling exhibitions, including Notes for Tomorrow and Axis Mundo, and it has been a pleasure to share this important exhibition with the Las Vegas community.

Curated by Sharmila Wood (Curatorial Intensive alum, New York Spring 2014), this traveling exhibition considers kinship, healing, and restorative interventions as artistic practices reminding us that we are connected within a constellation of living networks, inseparable from the earth. The exhibition emphasizes learning, care, and intimacy, inviting its publics to participate in instruction-based meditation and deep listening among other actions. Learn more about Actions for the Earth on our website!

📷s: Installation views, Actions for the Earth, Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Nevada, 2026. (Photo: Krystal Ramirez)

05/29/2026

Today's showcases the work of Demian Dine'Yahzi', featured in the ICI exhibition "Notes for Tomorrow"! The work, "An Infected Sunset," is also on view in New York as part of "Sovereign Acts III," curated by Wanda Nanibush, at The James Gallery at CUNY Graduate Center through July. The exhibition explores the relationship between nineteenth-century performing “Indians” and contemporary performance art; how Indigenous artists have taken up this history to create self-representations in photography, performance, video, and installation that challenge ideas of normative and static identity. Follow to learn more!

Demian DinéYazhi ́ is an artist, poet, and curator whose transdtransdisciplinary practice makes visible and legible the historical, unresolved, and continuing violence of colonization—as well as its current heteropatriarchal manifestations—for Indigenous and marginalized peoples, centering Indigenous knowledge and cosmology towards liberation and survivance. "An Infected Sunset" consists of excerpts from the artist’s poem of the same name, layered over moving images of alternating bodies of sand and water. This source poem—conceived on the heels of the massacre at the gay nightclub Pulse in Orlando, Florida, the threat of pipelines on sacred site at Standing Rock ( ), and state-sanctioned executions of Black men—speaks to the uninhibited and intertwined horrors of the white supremacist, capitalist, hetero-patriarchal, settler colonial state. In the video, DinéYazhi ́ speaks back at these violent legacies and the racist present to offer an invocation to q***r intimacy, Indigenous knowledge-making and remembering, and shared resistance.

05/27/2026

"Jørn Malde’s welcome aboard the 1973 Volvo bus anticipated many of the lines of inquiry that would emerge over the days of "Mutant Prospects" regarding forms of cross-influence and transformation underlying our activity as artists, curators, critics, and researchers," writes Arnau Horta (Curatorial Intensive alum, New York Fall 2013) in a new essay on our website. Arnau attended the ninth edition of Coast Contemporary—a nomadic platform for discourse and art that takes place in Norway each year—through a partnership between Coast and ICI. This edition, "Mutant Prospects," took place over seven days in September 2025 around the Stavanger area and focused on themes of "possible change from outer interference, extractivism, nature, art, solidarity economics, and dialogue." Read more and see photos at the link in bio!
📷s: Arnau Horta

05/26/2026

This week is the opening of "Ellen Pau: She Moves" curated by Freya Chou (Curatorial Intensive alum, New York Summer 2011) at Sculpture Center in New York! The exhibition is the first US survey exhibition of Ellen Pau, one of Hong Kong’s most influential and pioneering artists. Pau "addresses the contemporary political context of Hong Kong without falling into nostalgia or offering direct commentary; rather she alludes to shared experiences through emotion, harnessing the capacity of sound and image to preserve collective memory." Freya Chou has collaborated with Pau numerous times throughout her career, also curated the Taipei Biennial 2023, and was responsible for Pau’s last survey exhibition at Para Site, Hong Kong, in 2018. The exhibition also features several events, including a conversation between Freya and the artist on June 3. !

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