9th Annual Curating Performance Symposium
Guest speakers: Katherine C. M. Adams (EMPAC), Adrienne Edwards (Whitney Museum), T. Lax (MoMA), Diane Lima (independent curator)
For this 9th edition of our Annual Curating Performance Symposium, the invitation was for our four distinguished guests to gather more or less formally, more or less informally, around their experiences, their practices and their concerns regarding curation and regarding performance; regarding the performance that is curation. What does it mean to want to bring some-thing(s) / some-one(s) into a room, i.e., into the open? What does it mean to want to invite some act/action into the world, i.e., towards the public? As we invite four highly influential curators working at the confluence of live performance, visual arts, critical discourse, and Black Study to our Performance Studies studio, we also want to ask the event’s audience: what do we want to bring to our room in this performance of gathering; how do we want to establish grounds for a conversation, indeed for a symposium, to occur, in dialogue and in openness, around (non)performance and its (non)curation?
The 9th Annual Curating Performance Symposium is sponsored by the Department of Performance Studies and by the Center for Research & Study, Tisch School of the Arts.
Points of Departure / Position Topics and Bios in alphabetical order by last name.
Important Note: the sequence of interventions by the guest speakers may very well happen in different (dis)order during the symposium, depending on what needs to be said by whom at what moment.
De-commissioning Performance - Katherine C. M. Adams
Atmosphere, iteration, nomadism—drawing from ideas of the transitory and transitional, how can we create infrastructures for performance that are resilient and mobile? How might a ‘decommissioning’ model of performative curating open new possibilities for cultural survival?
Katherine C. M. Adams is a curator and writer based in New York. She is currently Associate Curator, Time-Based Visual Art, at EMPAC, where she works on commissions across visual arts and performance in addition to curating public programs and discursive projects. Her recent and forthcoming curatorial projects at EMPAC feature Suneil Sazngiri, Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Marina Rosenfeld, Ligia Lewis, and others. Adams’s articles and art criticism have been published in e-flux Journal, Afterimage, e-flux Notes, e-flux Criticism, Journal of Curatorial Studies, UCLA’s FLAT Journal, and BOMB Magazine, among others. She was the First Prize recipient of the 2022 International Awards for Art Criticism. Other past curated exhibitions and programs include projects at the Berrie Center for Performing and Visual Arts (New Jersey), the Hessel Museum of Art (Annandale-on-Hudson, New York), KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), and Miriam Gallery (New York).
“What of history, of experience, of their traces arrives with us, what and how do we manifest them, bring them into the room?” - Adrienne Edwards
Dr. Adrienne Edwards is the Engell Speyer Family Senior Curator and Associate Director of Curatorial Programs at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where she most recently curated Edges of Ailey, which was presented from September 2024 to February 2025. Edwards has been a curator at the Whitney since 2018. She co-curated Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept and enhanced the strength and vitality of the Museum's performance program. From 2021-2024, she also served as the Whitney’s Director of Curatorial Affairs. In 2022, she was the President of the International Jury of the 59th Venice Biennale, as well as a jury member for the 40th anniversary edition of Videobrasil in 2023 and the selection committee for the curatorship of the Berlin Biennale in 2018. Prior to the Whitney, Edwards served as curator of Performa in New York City and as Curator at Large for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis where she oversaw the Mellon Interdisciplinary Initiative. In addition to over fifty commissions in film, performance, and the visual arts, Edwards’s curatorial projects have also included the thematic intergenerational and interdisciplinary exhibition and catalogue Blackness in Abstraction presented at Pace Gallery (2016); the traveling exhibition and catalogue Jason Moran at the Walker Art Center, ICA Boston, and Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2018–19); “Moved by the Motion: Sudden Rise” (2020), a series of performances based on a text co-written by Wu Tsang, boychild, and Fred Moten at the Whitney; Dave McKenzie's first solo museum exhibition in New York City The Story I Tell Myself and its pendant performance commission “Disturbing the View” (2021) at the Whitney; and the performance collective My Barbarian's twentieth anniversary exhibition and catalogue (2021–22) at the Whitney and ICA LA. She was part of the Whitney's core team for David Hammons’s public art monument Day’s End. Edwards has taught art history, performance, and visual studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, New York University, and the New School, and she has contributed essays to academic journals, artist monographs, group exhibition catalogues, and art magazines as well as other publications. She holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University.
Dispatches from the Extreme Middle. - T. Lax
How do creative people manifest their own visions of the world in response to histories of exclusion and dispossession? How can we work with others to contextualize and care for precarious practices: artists working in ephemeral media like performance, as well as Black communities who have built self-made traditions? Thomas will speak to these questions as he narrates his projects including Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces in collaboration with Linda Goode Bryant and Lilia Rocio Taboada; the exhibition Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done in 2018 with Ana Janevski and Martha Joseph; and his research fellowship on contemporary Black art in Brazil.
T Lax is a curator at New York's Museum of Modern Art with a commitment to black art, performance, and collaboration. Thomas began his career at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where in 2014, he put together the show When The Stars Begin To Fall: Imagination and the American South about the importance of quilting, yard art, and music in contemporary art. Over the last fifteen years, he has made recurring survey exhibitions including contributing to the landmark “f show” contemporary art series at the Studio Museum with Lauren Haynes and Naima J. Keith and Greater New York at MoMA PS1 with Douglas Crimp, Peter Eleey and Mia Locks. He was also on the Advisory Council for Prospect New Orleans 5 as well as for the most recent São Paulo Biennial in Brazil, co-organized by Diane Lima. In 2022, T organized an exhibition about Just Above Midtown -- a black art gallery in Midtown Manhattan founded by Linda Goode Bryant in the early 1970s. In November of last year, he worked with Connie Butler and Kari RIttenbach opened a survey exhibition of the choreographer Ralph Lemon, which is now on view.
The Impossible: Curatorship as a performative utterance. - Diane Lima
Drawing on the relationship between theory and practice, this presentation questions what the presence of the Black body demands when inhabiting the space of the impossible. Bringing into the conversation Denise Ferreira da Silva's notion that a Black feminist practice “yields that which is at once a feat, a deed, a burden, and an artifact,” and Leda Maria Martins's statement that “that which in the voice and body is repeated is an episteme," curator Diane Lima will approach her reflections on curatorial practice as a performative utterance. Examining what the experience of the impossible from Brazil has produced, Lima will comment on several racial events that will culminate in the 35th São Paulo Bienal -choreographies of the impossible.
Diane Lima is a Brazilian curator, scholar, and a key black feminist voice in Latin American Art. Most recently, she has organized choreographies of the impossible, the 35th São Paulo Bienal (2023), Paulo Nazareth: Luzia at Museo Tamayo in Mexico City (2024), The River is a Serpente, the 3rd Frestas Triennial of Arts (2020/2021), and the two-year program Absent Dialogues at Itaú Cultural (São Paulo, 2016–2017), which played a historic role in shaping the Brazilian anticolonial turning point in contemporary art. In 2025, Lima was appointed as part of the Scientific Advisory Board of documenta and Museum Fridericianum GmbH in Germany, and she currently serves as Programming Director for the ESAP Fellowship 2025, an initiative led by the A&L Berg Foundation that provides professional development to Latinx curators in the United States. In 2024, Lima was a Guest Professor at the Institute of Aesthetic Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She is the recipient of a 2021 Ford Foundation Global Fellowship, a program that celebrates the next generation of social justice leaders worldwide. Lima edited the critically-acclaimed anthology Negros na Piscina: Arte Contemporânea,Curadoria e Educação (Blacks in the Pool: Contemporary Art, Curatorship and Education) (Fósforo, 2024), which chronicles the last ten years of the debate around raciality and art in Brazil. She also co-edited the volume Textes à lire à voix haute (Texts to read aloud), which united anticolonial dissident voices across Lusophone-Francophone contexts (Brook, 2022).