Since September 2005, Chris Gilbert has been MATRIX Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive. From 2003 to 2005, as curator of contemporary art at The Baltimore Museum of Art, he conceived and organized the series of experimental exhibitions entitled “Cram Sessions” – month-long projects that posed the question of what might constitute a critical art practice today. With a roving focus, the series touched upon the nexus of political- and exhibition-organizing; art’s political and social agency; and its potential as a site of independent research and horizontal learning in an era of increasing instrumentalization of knowledge.
In 2004, with Cira Pascual Marquina, Gilbert organized the project cycle “Transport to Summer” dealing with the poetics and politics of escape at Fundació “la Caixa” in Lleida, Spain. Gilbert has lectured widely on contemporary art and exhibition practices and has written numerous magazine and journal articles, most recently for Art Journal, Bomb, and Oxford Art Journal.
Gilbert is a graduate of Harvard University, where he focused on philosophy and literature. He grew up in East and West Africa. In 2002 and 2003, he carried out extensive travel and research into new European art spaces, funded in part by a grant from the American Center Foundation.
Gilbert’s work on artists’ collectives – including a case study of the conceptual art group Art & Language in the mid-1970s – has been recently published in Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, and Practice (ed. Michael Corris, Cambridge University Press) with further material soon to appear in Collectivism after Modernism (eds. Gregory Sholette and Blake Stimson, University of Minnesota Press).
In 2004, with Cira Pascual Marquina, Gilbert organized the project cycle “Transport to Summer” dealing with the poetics and politics of escape at Fundació “la Caixa” in Lleida, Spain. Gilbert has lectured widely on contemporary art and exhibition practices and has written numerous magazine and journal articles, most recently for Art Journal, Bomb, and Oxford Art Journal.
Gilbert is a graduate of Harvard University, where he focused on philosophy and literature. He grew up in East and West Africa. In 2002 and 2003, he carried out extensive travel and research into new European art spaces, funded in part by a grant from the American Center Foundation.
Gilbert’s work on artists’ collectives – including a case study of the conceptual art group Art & Language in the mid-1970s – has been recently published in Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, and Practice (ed. Michael Corris, Cambridge University Press) with further material soon to appear in Collectivism after Modernism (eds. Gregory Sholette and Blake Stimson, University of Minnesota Press).
