I'll Take Care of You: Artist Interventions within Museum Collections with Tanya Gayer

Thurs, July 22 | 9am-10:30am

Tuition: $15

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Concept

Museum collections are known to identify and celebrate a historic event, preserve important moments of an artist's career, and represent cultural and artistic innovations. Yet, collection holdings can also simplify identities and contain items that belong to stewards outside of an institution. To acknowledge these factors, select museums have invited artists to respond to collections and analyze the role of the permanent collection. This engagement highlights the authoritative position of a museum, while also providing an opportunity for an individual outside of an institution to suggest methods in which certain cultures and identities can see themselves in the future alongside a collection.

Experience

Join curator and writer Tanya Gayer for a discussion of how two artists, Jackie Milad and John Edmonds, have undertaken this kind of work with the Walters Art Museum (MD) and the Brooklyn Museum (NY), respectively, and are positioned within this research to understand the strategies they use to cultivate a sense of belonging within a collection and what influence they had in shaping the direction of institutional collection policies. All are welcome.

Instructor

Tanya Gayer is a curator and writer based in Sheboygan, WI. Her curatorial projects and research examine archives, databases, collections, and algorithmic processing to reveal how these systems of categorization and preservation influence the formation of identity and culture. Tanya received her dual Master's degree in Curatorial Practice and Visual + Critical Studies from California College of the Arts and her BFA from the University of Nevada-Reno. Recent curatorial projects include Good to See You: Ilana Harris-Babou and Yoshie Sakai (2026); How do you throw a brick through the window... (2026); Sarah Rowe: Water Ledger (2025), among many others throughout her career at John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Adobe Books Backroom Gallery, CTRL + SHFT, Embark Gallery, Gray Area, Hubbell Street Galleries, Pro Arts Gallery, Root Division, and Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts. Tanya has been in residence at ACRE, Rogers Art Loft, Wassaic Project, Picture Berlin, and Signal Culture. She has lectured at Tufts University, UC-Santa Barbara, UC-San Diego, University of Mississippi, California College of the Arts, and CODAME Art + Tech Festival. She has held curatorial and exhibition management positions at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, Soundwave, among others. Tanya is currently an Associate Curator at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.