Cross-Border Dialogues: Michelle Jacques and Kimberli Gant

Michelle Jacques is a curator and writer who specializes in Canadian art of the 20th and 21st centuries. Since 2021, she has been the Director of Exhibitions and Collections/Chief Curator at Remai Modern in Saskatoon. She began her curatorial career at the Art Gallery of Ontario (1995-2012), where she held various positions in the Contemporary and Canadian art departments before departing to become the chief curator at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria in 2012. Her recent curatorial projects include Denyse Thomasos: just beyond, co-curated with Renee van der Avoird and Sally Frater (AGO and Remai Modern, 2022-23 and traveling); and Ken Lum: Death and Furniture, co-curated with Johan Lundh (Remai Modern and AGO, 2022). Over the course of her career, she has curated and written about the work of numerous contemporary artists, and she maintains a strong research interest in Canadian modernism, cultivated during her graduate studies. In 2022, Jacques was the recipient of the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award in Curatorial excellence, and she is currently the president of the board of the AAMC Foundation – Art Curators, a New York-based organization that supports and promotes the work of art curators around the world.

Kimberli Gant is the Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. She was previously the McKinnon Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art at the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, VA, and has also worked as the Mellon Doctoral Fellow at the Newark Museum, and Director of Exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art (MoCADA).

She has curated numerous exhibitions and gallery reinstallations including Spike Lee: Creative Sources (2023), Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz & Alicia Keys (2024), Black Orpheus: Jacob Lawrence & the Mbari Club (2022), Journey’s Across the Border: U.S. & Mexico (2021-22), Tuan Andrew Nguyen: The Boat People (2021), Brendan Fernandes: Bodily Forms (2020), and John Akomfrah: Tropikos (2019). Gant received her PhD in Art History from the University of Texas Austin (2017), and holds both a MA and BA in Art History from Columbia University (2009) and Pitzer College (2002).

Gant has published scholarly work in academic books, such as Anywhere But Here: Black Intellectuals in the Atlantic World and Beyond (2015), art publications such as NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Art Lies and African Arts, and exhibition catalogues for The Chrysler Museum, The Newark Museum, The Contemporary Austin, the Studio Museum of Harlem, MoCADA, Paris Photo, and the Centre for Contemporary Art Lagos.

Sally Frater is the daughter of immigrants from the Caribbean. Curatorially she is interested in decolonial praxis, space and place, Black and Caribbean diasporas, photography, art of the everyday, and issues of equity and representation in museological spaces. She has curated solo and group exhibitions for institutions such as the Art Gallery of Ontario, Art Gallery of Guelph, the Ulrich Museum of Art, Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at the University of Toronto, Project Row Houses, and Centre[3] for Artistic and Social Practice. She is the senior curator/curatorial manager at the Remai Modern in Saskatoon, SK.