Alpesh Kantilal Patel is a contemporary art historian, critic, and curator based at Florida International University, Miami, where he directed the MFA program in Visual Arts from 2012-2017.

“Storytelling and Worldmaking.” Artworks can be part of innumerable contexts: everything from contemporary painting to the history of flamingos. Adapting the popular PechaKucha format of storytelling, participants will give pithy presentations (10 slides, 20 seconds each) driven by image as a mode of research (rather than reflections of what you already know). These will then be discussed as a group with an eye toward clarifying that artworks do not exist in a vacuum but are always already part of multiple, vibrant contexts. The workshop will empower students to consider what artworks and broader ideas they are in dialogue with. At the same time, this workshop will underscore that artworks do not reflect the world but instantiate new ones.

Recent Exhibition Reviews:

Using antique quilts Sanford Biggers creates an Afrofuturist History of the Underground Railroad, Art in America, February 3, 2020

Gauging the Potential of Abstraction at Art Basel Miami Beach, Hyperallergic, December 6, 2019

The Post-Colonial Theorists Who Changed Contemporary Art, Frieze, August 7, 2019