With Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative at The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage Seminar led by artists Olga Egorova and Dmitry Vilensky (Chto delat). October 13, 2010. This course, developed with the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative (PEI) for 8 curators based in the Philadelphia area, focuses on looking at how to extend networks and develop research practices that can enhance participants’ current curatorial practices. The course takes place over three sessions from October 2010 to January 2011. Sessions in October and December are structured as workshops and one-on-one advisement sessions. The third session in January is a 2-day think tank including a day-long series of presentations in which participants present their proposals to a professional audience. Guest faculty for the program include Doryun Chong (Associate Curator, Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA, New York), Olga Egorova and Dmitry Vilensky (artist collective Chto delat, St. Petersburg), Weng Choy Lee (art critic, and Director of Projects, Research, and Publications, Osage Foundation, Hong Kong), Nat Muller (independent curator, Rotterdam). ICI Executive Director Kate Fowle leads all three sessions. Read more about the the first workshop series here. Read more about the second workshop series here. Read the Curatorial Intensive blog.

Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative (PEI) was established in 1997 to foster artistic development and excellence in the region’s visual arts community by supporting public visual arts exhibitions and accompanying publications of high artistic caliber and cultural significance. PEI awards grants of up to $250,000 for exhibitions implementation, and up to $25,000 for exhibitions planning, to independent curators and organizations meeting the program’s eligibility requirements. These grants are awarded annually on a competitive basis and are selected by a panel of internationally recognized visual arts professionals. Between 1997 and 2010 PEI panels awarded grants totaling $10.7 million, bringing outstanding visual arts exhibitions to the region’s audiences, as well as to the field. PEI also provides professional development opportunities through curatorial roundtables and symposia that address important issues in the field, travel grants for curatorial research and development, and access to its growing research library of 2000 volumes. PEI commissions and publishes critical writing on curatorial practice including proceedings from the symposium Curating Now: Imaginative Practice/Public Responsibility and an anthology entitled Questions of Practice: What Makes a Great Exhibition? A new anthology exploring innovations in exhibition-making is forthcoming. Visit the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative website. Read the blog of the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative.