curator Grace Ali
Last month Guyanese-born curator Grace Ali was awarded a landmark curatorial fellowship by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, to research and present “Modern Guyana”, the first major New York City exhibition featuring Guyanese contemporary photography, in 2015.
This April, at New York Public Library’s Schomburg Centre for Research in Black Culture, she will host a discussion with some of the participating photographers. She will return to Guyana as part of her research for the project.
Over the past several years, Ali has been collecting and sharing scholarship about Guyana. In 2003, she leveraged a Fulbright scholarship to travel to India, excavating the transplanted roots of her Indian background.
As a “Young Global Shaper” at World Economic Forum’s 2013 annual meeting, she participated in high-level conversations focused on raising awareness of Guyana’s art and culture.
That same year, she wrote the cover story and curated a landmark issue of the Nueva Luz Journal featuring Guyanese photographers. She is, perhaps, the only individual doing this work, looking at the artistic and cultural production from Guyana, a nation stereotyped by poverty and the People’s Temple suicide tragedy decades ago.
Ali is also the founder and editorial director of OF NOTE, one of the first online magazines focused on global artists using the arts as catalysts for activism and social change. She is an adjunct professor of literature for the City University of New York. Ali currently hosts the Visually Speaking series at the Schomburg Centre, which examines the state of photojournalism through the lens of contemporary photographers and image-makers.
Ali was born in Guyana and immigrated to the U.S. when she was 14 years old. Guyana continues to inform and influence her worldview. The artist can be reached on telephone number (646)421-4283 or via e-mail at havelockn@gmail.com.
