My curatorial practice has ranged from guerrilla public art installations to collaborations with institutions like Mural Arts Philadelphia and the Women's March, usually with a focus on street art, graffiti, or digital art.

Selected curatorial projects:

Masked Vigilantes on Silent Motorbikes
Curator

Poster House. New York City, NY. September 2022 - February 2023.

Caroline Caldwell, David Wojnarowicz, Entes, Galen Gibson-Cornell, Jacques Villeglé, and more.

Made to appeal to broad audiences, posters both reflect and shape popular culture. They can be used by anyone from the largest corporations to DIY party promoters—and, just as they are a part of the city, they become a part of us when we interact with them.

Still, posters tend to be a one-way street, communication from brand or promoter to person. What if renegade artists steal that powerful visual language and twist it to best demonstrate the democratic potential of the medium?

Masked Vigilantes on Silent Motorbikes is not an exhibition of posters as art, but of art by nearly 20 artists that incorporates found, re-configured, and even shredded posters as raw material for making new art, repurposing the poster’s innate ability to communicate succinctly and en masse.

The exhibition was organized at Poster House, the first museum in the country dedicated to presenting the impact, culture, and design of posters, both as historical documents and methods of contemporary visual communication.

Art in Ad Places
Co-Curator

Art in Ad Places. New York City, NY. January 2017 - June 2021.

Molly Crabapple, Jeffrey Gibson, Shepard Fairey, Ganzeer, Guerrilla Girls, Christine Sun Kim, Hank Willis Thomas, and more.

Nobody likes billboards. Lots of people like art. Wouldn’t the world be better if we got rid of the ads and replaced them with… literally anything else? I think so, which is I co-founded Art in Ad Places.

Over four and a half years, Art in Ad Places partnered with more than 100 artists to install their work in payphones across New York City, replacing street-level advertising with world-class artwork.

Rooted in traditions of culture jamming, Art in Ad Places was a guerrilla public art campaign guided by David Graeber’s definition of direct action: “the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.” With each artwork that we installed, we created a tiny piece of the world as we wished it to be.

The project received extensive media attention. We were cited among the Best Art of 2019 in The New York Times, interviewed by the CBC, and called “petty criminals” in the National Review. All press is good press, right?

In my role as a co-founder, I wore many hats: Curator, art installer, website administrator, et cetera.

Tools of the Trade
Co-Curator

HKwalls. Soho House Hong Kong. Hong Kong. May - June 2021.

Martha Cooper, Jordan Seiler, stikman, Adam Void, and more.

HKwalls organized Tool of the Trade at Soho House Hong Kong during their annual HKwalls festival. The exhibition used artwork, documentation, and ephemera to frame the history of street art and graffiti through the tools that artists use to create their work. The exhibition highlighted the wide range of tools used throughout graffiti history, their evolution, and the ingenuity of the artists that make and use them.

As a guest co-curator, I shared my expertise developed while curating a past exhibition along a similar theme and sourced some of the same artworks that I had previously exhibited. HKwalls updated and adapted the concept by bringing in a more extensive collection of photography by Martha Cooper, incorporating local Hong Kong artists and history, and drawing on the archives of fellow guest curator David “CHINO” Villorente.

Heliotrope Foundation Prints
Curator

Heliotrope Foundation. Summer 2020.

Jess X. Snow and Ernest Zacharevic.

I partnered with Swoon’s Heliotrope Foundation on a fundraiser, coordinating the release of two prints by Ernest Zacharevic and Jess X. Snow.

We The People
Curator

Mural Arts Philadelphia. Philadelphia, PA. July - October 2017.

Molly Crabapple, Daze, Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, Dennis McNett, NTEL, and Jess X Snow.

In the spring of 2017, Mural Arts Philadelphia invited me to curate a series of murals, which became We The People. I worked with six artists celebrate the best of the American spirit while speaking to the precarious state of the country.

Each artist highlighted timely national crises. Molly Crabapple questioned the concept of national borders. Chris “Daze” Ellis emphasized the importance of education. Tatyana Fazlalizadeh provoked conversations on race and privilege. Dennis McNett celebrated the country’s natural beauty, under threat from the development of public lands. NTEL shone a light on food justice. Jess X. Snow wove together ideas of immigration and environmental stewardship. Together, the murals planted seeds of hope for the future.

Lair of Mischief
Art Advisor

Ultra-Mod Home Concepts. Vail, CO. Summer, 2017.

Yok and Sheryo.

A private commission in a concrete 3-story home in Vail, Colorado. The owners wanted a series of cheeky murals. Yok and Sheryo gave their interpretation of the fall of man, told over 3 accent walls and a 40-foot glass elevator shaft.

ALL BIG LETTERS
Curator

Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College. Haverford, PA. January 2017.

BLADE, Biancoshock, CURVE, EKG, Evan Roth, FAUST, Jordan Seiler, Lee Quinones, Martha Cooper, Smart Crew, and more.

How far would you go for your art? Would you pick a lock? Scale a building? Risk arrest? Those are just some of the occupational hazards of a graffiti writer. And for the (mostly) kids who birthed and grew this contemporary folk art movement, the recognition is worth it. To illicitly spray paint a pseudonym on enough public spaces to earn a reputation requires taking risks, thinking creatively, and being resourceful. But to those outside the graffiti world, their work can be misunderstood or under appreciated. ALL BIG LETTERS was an exhibition that aimed to demystify the tools and strategies of graffiti.

The exhibition included a wide array of objects and artworks, many rarely exhibited and some brand new. Major new works were commissioned from CURVE, EKG, Evan Roth, and FAUST. Photographers including Martha Cooper opened up their rarely-exhibited archives. A Lee Quinones painting was borrowed from the Museum of the City of New York. Biancoshock, stikman, and others loaned custom tools from their studios. By doing more than simply exhibiting paintings or photographs of finished pieces, ALL BIG LETTERS became less about the art of graffiti and more about the craft of writing it.

Rally and Retreat
Curator

LMNL Gallery. Philadelphia, PA. March 2016.

Joe Boruchow

Rally and Retreat was a polarizing body of work from Joe Boruchow: Hard cut metal and fragile works on paper, temporary installations and works meant to last for centuries, static illustrations and short films, Republicans and Democrats, realism and cubism… all captured in bold black and white.

Amazon Street Art Project
Curator

Amazon.com. December 2015.

Lady Aiko, Ron English, Faith47, Gaia, Ganzeer, Logan Hicks, and stikman.

Amazon.com asked me to curate a series of seven new editioned works by street artists, where were sold exclusively on the Fine Art section of their site. This was Amazon’s first time working with an art curator on a series of products. I aimed to capture a small slice of the variety that exists within street art, emphasizing that the community resists being defined by a single style or technique. The full suite of artworks included two screenprints (stikman and Gaia), one hand-finished screenprint (Lady Aiko), one etching (Faith47), one letterpress print (Ganzeer), hand-painted edition made entirely with spraypaint and stencils (Logan Hicks), and one hand-finished giclée (Ron English).

The Shipwrecks of Unicorn Beach
Curator

LMNL Gallery. Philadelphia, PA. November 2015.

Adam Wallacavage

Adam Wallcavage’s The Shipwrecks of Unicorn Beach grew out of a mystery: What were these surreal old shipwrecks that Wallacavage was photographing and sharing on Instagram? Were they real? Photoshopped? Staged? Where? How did he find them, and why couldn’t anyone else? Despite his stature as a key member of the Philadelphia arts community, The Shipwrecks of Unicorn Beach was Wallacavage’s first photography exhibition in over a decade.

Community Tech
Co-Curator

Crux Space. Philadelphia, PA. June 2015.

Meg Saligman, Ben Volta, and Nadia Hironaka & Matthew Suib.

The City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program is known for their massive public artworks peppering Philadelphia. What’s not immediately apparent in the murals, however, is that many of the artists that Mural Arts works with also produce new media works as part of, and in addition to, their public practice. Community Tech highlights the digital and video works of artists who have also participated in building Philadelphia’s public art landscape.

Bob-omb
Curator

NO AD. February 2015.

By The Barkers, Caitlin Burns, Dave Whyte, Hrag Vartanian, James Kerr – Scorpion Dagger, Jeremyville, Maori Sakai, Molly Soda, Paolo Čerić aka Patakk, Ryan Seslow, The Current Sea, YoMeryl, and Zack Dougherty.

Bob-omb weaponized animated GIFs as tools for re-imaging public space. Users of the NO AD app could view the exhibition by pointing their phones at the advertisements peppering the New York City subway system. Looking at the world through the app’s augmented reality display, each ad was instantly replaced by one of more than a dozen GIFs (view a demo here). Bom-omb was NO AD’s first exhibition to utilize animations.

First Island
Curator

LMNL Gallery. Philadelphia, PA. November 2014.

Lucia Thomé

When Lucia Thomé was little, she learned that solid objects are made of rapidly moving atoms. This freaked her out. If this were true, then if she leaned on her wooden desk for too long, the atoms might all move out of the way and her elbow would be stuck in that wooden desk forever.

Thomé did not, in the end, get stuck in her desk, but she did get stuck on this question: What if nothing is what it seems, and each thing is made of what it’s not? If solids are made from moving parts, then maybe wrenches can be tied into knots and maybe the earth is built of steel and wood.

In First Island, Thomé explored these possibilities.

…in the house…
Curator

Lincoln Financial Mural Arts Center at the Thomas Eakins House. Philadelphia, PA. October-November 2013.

stikman

stikman’s solo exhibition at the headquarters of Mural Arts Philadelphia was a meeting of two separate worlds that operate in parallel: stikman’s street art and Mural Arts Philadelphia’s government-funded public art. Their work addresses the same audience and can be found in the same spaces, but they have different scales and techniques. …in the house… was an acknowledgement of mutual respect and admiration between a guerrilla art interventionist and and a mural-making machine.

Up Close and Personal
Co-Curator

The MaNY Project. New York, NY. May 2011.

How&Nosm, Troy Lovegates, John Fekner, Skewville, Lady Aiko, Know Hope, Logan Hicks, and more.

All too often, galleries are full of amazing paintings that are just too damn big for a typical apartment. Up Close and Personal took the opposite approach. The exhibition was held inside an apartment on the Upper West Side, and we encouraged artists to think as small as possible. The apartment setting got also artists thinking about household objects, and the exhibition featured paintings and drawings on books, MetroCards, and even a mirror.

The Thousands
Curator

Village Underground. London, UK. November 2009.

Banksy, Barry McGee, Faile, KAWS, Jenny Holzer, José Parlá, Os Gêmeos, Shepard Fairey, Swoon, and more.

The first exhibition that I curated was out of frustration with how the mainstream art world seemed to treat the work of street artists: Fine for the plebs, maybe okay if it’s a mural, but definitely not something for inside of the museum. The Thousands was an attempt to show what a museum exhibition of contemporary street artists might look like. Except that I was 18, had no curatorial experience, and only knew a handful of collectors that I could borrow work from. It really shouldn’t have worked out as well as it did.

The Thousands was held as a pop-up exhibition in London’s street art epicenter of Shoreditch, and we saw thousands of visitors over just a five day run. Yes, one very expensive painting did fall off the wall. And yes, a few sections were hung salon style with too many unrelated pieces next to one another. However, the exhibition did look good, and helped to mark a moment in the London street art community where the artists we loved were just on the cusp of being taken seriously by major art institutions.