FRONT 2022 was conceived through a collaborative methodology that reflected a curatorial interest in group dynamics and therapeutic processes. Beginning early in 2019, the exhibition’s Artistic Director, Prem Krishnamurthy, convened local cultural partners and stakeholders to consider the goals, methods, and outputs of the exhibition, resulting in the assembly of an expanded Artistic Team that played a key role throughout the exhibition’s development.
The Artistic Team is a multidisciplinary group who guided and advised on the exhibition’s process and worked to amplify its public impact. FRONT 2022’s artistic team was comprised of Evelyn Burnett, Courtenay Finn, Tina Kukielski, Emily Liebert, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Tereza Ruller, and Murtaza Vali. Their voices captured local, regional, and international perspectives, and their collective skills spanning design, publishing, curation, education, and community organization. They worked in close collaboration with the Curatorial Team.
PREM KRISHNAMURTHY
2022 Artistic Director
Prem Krishnamurthy is based in Berlin and New York. His work across media explores the transformative potential of art and design by experimenting with presentational strategies, performative modes, and ways of communing. He currently directs Wkshps, a multidisciplinary design consultancy and organizes Commune /kəˈmjuːn/, an emergent workshop that practices artistic tools for social transformation. Prem received the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Communications Design in 2015 and KW Institute for Contemporary Art’s “A Year With…” residency fellowship in 2018. Previously, he founded the design studio Project Projects and the exhibition space P! in New York. In March 2021, Pompeii Commitment released his digital artwork, Pompeii!, which reflects upon rituals, destruction, memory, and letting go.
Artistic Team Members:
Evelyn Burnett
ThirdSpace Action Lab, Cleveland
Evelyn Burnett is co-founder and partner of the ThirdSpace Action Lab (TSAL) and Third Space Café. Prior to starting TSAL, she served as Vice President, Economic Opportunity at Cleveland Neighborhood Progress, Associate Director for Program Strategies with Admiral Center at Living Cities, project director in the city of Cleveland’s Office of Sustainability, and Cleveland Executive (Coro) Fellow. Burnett is a 2018 German Marshall Fellow and holds board officer roles for Birthing Beautiful Communities, ioby, and Teach for America.
Courtenay Finn
moCa Cleveland
Courtenay Finn is currently the Chief Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland (moCa). Prior to her appointment at moCa, she was Senior Curator at the Aspen Art Museum (AAM), where she organized thematic exhibitions such as Lost Without Your Rhythm, Gravity & Grace, and The Revolution Will Not Be Gray; as well as solo exhibitions of Yto Barrada, Haris Epaminonda, and Mickalene Thomas. From 2011–2014, Finn was the curator at Art in General, New York. In 2013, she co-curated North by Northeast, the Latvian Pavilion for the 55th edition of the Venice Biennale.
Tina Kukielski
Art21, New York City
Tina Kukielski is based in New York City where she is Executive Director and Chief Curator of Art21, a nonprofit art organization specializing in storytelling about contemporary art and producers of award-winning documentary films on artists. Kukielski previously held curatorial positions at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh and has independently curated exhibitions in Dubai, Milan, Naples, and Miami. She was a co-curator of the acclaimed 2013 Carnegie International with Daniel Baumann and Dan Byers.
Emily Liebert
The Cleveland Museum of Art
Emily Liebert is Curator of Contemporary Art at The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA). Since joining the museum in 2017, she has curated and co-curated exhibitions of Kerry James Marshall, Liu Wei, and Raúl de Nieves, as well as a forthcoming exhibition with Laura Owens opening in summer 2020. Liebert also co-organized, with Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi, CMA’s first site-specific commission in its atrium, Emeka Ogboh’s Ámà: The Gathering Place (2019). Before her appointment at the CMA, she worked at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) as curatorial assistant for the retrospective Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends (2017) and curated Multiple Occupancy: Eleanor Antin’s “Selves” (2013) at Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery, and ICA Boston.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed
Artist, Brooklyn
Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a Brooklyn-based learner from East Palo Alto, CA. In her work, she researches the deeply intertwined spiritual, socio-political, ecological, and cognitive processes of learning/unlearning. Rasheed makes her inquiries visible through an ecosystem of iterative and provisional projects including sprawling, Xerox-based “architecturally-scaled collages” (Frieze, winter 2018), publications, public works, prints, digital archives, lecture-performances, library interventions, poems/poetic gestures, and other forms yet to be determined.
Tereza Ruller
The Rodina, Amsterdam
Tereza Ruller is an independent designer and co-founder of The Rodina, a communication design studio. She investigates theoretical frameworks around bodies, labor, surface, and action. Her studio invents ways in which experience, knowledge, and relations are produced and preserved. The Rodina works primarily with cultural clients such as Harvard GSD (USA), Sonic Acts (NL), and Hyundai Card Library (KR). Ruller is an educator at Design Academy Eindhoven. She exhibits and lectures internationally, including at CalArts (USA), Cooper Union (USA), and ZHDK (CH).
Annie Wischmeyer
Curator
Annie Wischmeyer (she/her) is a curator and writer based in Kent, Ohio. Alongside FRONT, she is the Curatorial Consultant for Curated Storefront in Akron, Ohio, helping to develop new installations and expand the scope of the organization's mission of transforming Akron into a dynamic urban destination through the arts. She was previously a curator at the Akron Art Museum and Associate Curator of the Hunter College Galleries in New York City, where she organized numerous exhibitions and interdisciplinary public programs.
Murtaza Vali
Independent Curator, Brooklyn/Sharjah
Murtaza Vali is a curator, critic, and art historian based in Brooklyn and Sharjah. His ongoing research interests include materialist art histories, ex-centric minimalisms, ghosts and other figures of liminal subjectivities and repressed histories, the weight of color, and contemporary art of the Indian Ocean littoral. In addition to FRONT, he is an Adjunct Curator at the Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai, where he curated the widely acclaimed inaugural group exhibition Crude (2018), which explored the relationship between oil and modernity across South West Asia. Other notable curatorial projects include: (with Uzma Rizvi) Accommodations, the National Pavilion of Saudi Arabia at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale (2021); and Substructures: Excavating the Everyday (2020-22), a series of exhibitions about “intimate infrastructures” in the Gulf at Warehouse421 in Abu Dhabi. A recipient of a 2011 Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for Short-Form Writing, he publishes regularly in various international art periodicals and in publications for non-profit institutions and commercial galleries around the world. A Visiting Instructor at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, he was a Guest Tutor of Campus Art Dubai 1.0-2.0 (2012-14), a Lead Tutor (with Uzma Rizvi) of Campus Art Dubai 3.0-8.0 (2014-20), and a Lead Mentor for the inaugural Hayy Learning Curatorial Fellowship (2020-21).