GWYNETH SHANKS
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ABOUT

I am a curator, scholar, educator, and performance-based artist. In my work, I draw on visual and performance studies, queer theory, critical race studies, and postcolonial theory in order to demonstrate how performance and performative art can expose the colonialist structures and histories embedded within arts institutions and contemporary art.

My research unfolds through scholarly writing and through collaborative, site-informed artistic projects that draw upon curatorial and performance methods, the later of which have been supported by the MAP Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Graham Foundation, and the Maine Arts Commission.

I am an Assistant Professor of Performance Studies at Colby College, where I teach courses in contemporary art, performance, spatial practice, and critical race and post-colonial studies. Prior to joining Colby, I held curatorial positions at the Walker Art Center, at the Whitney Museum of American Art through the Independent Study Program, and I worked in the Academic Programs Department at the Hammer Museum. I earned my PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles.

My writing is published in Theatre JournalCultural DynamicsThird TextPerformance Matters, the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Lateral, and X-TRA. My writing also appears in a number of anthologies and art catalogues, including A.A.H.D.H. published with the Whitney Museum of Art and Side by Side: Collaborative Artistic Practices in the United States, 1960s-1980s with the Walker Art Center. As a performer, I worked with the Trisha Brown Dance Company, Maria Hassabi, Jérôme Bel, Meredith Monk, Marina Abramović, Alex Shilling, and Sarah Leddy.

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CURRENT PROJECTS

I am at work on two projects. One, a monograph-length text, examines a series of performances that happened in contemporary art museums and focuses on how their scores help reveal and re-imagine museums’ structural logics. The Museum on the Move: Race, Coloniality, and Performance takes seriously the potential of small-scale and fleeting gestures within each performance to question museums’ stability, which is premised, I argue, upon asserting systems of colonial and imperial rule and capitalist production as, likewise, stable and impermeable.

A second project, a haunted botany, supported by the MAP Fund, asks what happens when we examine colonialism through human relationships with plants. This multi-sited, collaborative performance work, explores a dialectic between the historic violence of colonization and the pleasure and desire engendered through plants, focusing on accounts of queer intimacy facilitated through inter-species relationships that exceeded the bounds of colonial containment and scientific epistemologies.

 
 

GET IN TOUCH:

gwynn.shanks@gmail.com

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