Images 1 of 1
Lecture We Don’t Need No Education: Curating within and beyond the School by Alaina Claire
10.6.2025, 18:00
We're closed at the moment
The first university museum, the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University, opened in 1683 at the height of the Enlightenment. Private cabinets of curiosities became repositories of artifacts and popular places of study for the upper class. Meanwhile, the growing proletariat over the next centuries needed to be educated and so these cabinets began to open up or bestowed onto universities as places where many could continue to encounter these collections.
Today, all across the United States, university art museums have become important places of learning for students, sites of interdisciplinary collaboration, opportunities for experiential learning outside the classroom, and cultural and community centers that bridge the “gown and town.” In many smaller cities, the university art museum is often the only local museum for art, and so its growing responsibility and audience needs to be assessed.
In conjunction with the exhibition Coming of Age at KIM? Contemporary Art Centre, co-curator Alaina Claire Feldman will present a talk about her work over the past 7 years of directing and curating at Mishkin Gallery at the City University of New York, and now at the Langson IMCA at the University of California, Irvine. Coming of Age is an upcoming exhibition that engages with youth culture and the liminal space between childhood and adulthood as represented by contemporary artists from New York and Riga.
Feldman will discuss creating interdisciplinary programs with faculty, students, and artists that appropriate the gallery as a laboratory where things might be activated by the college community in new and experimental ways. Unlike traditional museums, universities have an audience of thousands of young people, access to cutting-edge research, and collaborators from all over the world. Feldman will also discuss her work as both a college professor and curator, and how merging the two positions creates deeper engagements with art for young people.
Alaina Claire Feldman is the inaugural chief curator at University of California Irvine’s Langson Institute and Museum of California Art (IMCA). From 2018 to 2024 she was the director and curator of Mishkin Gallery at the City University of New York, where she was also an adjunct professor in the Fine and Performing Arts department. From 2011–2018 she was the Director of Exhibitions at Independent Curators International (ICI).
Supporters: Ministry of Culture, State Culture Capital Foundation, Riga City Council, Baltic-American Freedom Foundation, Lode, Neputns, Valmiermuiža