Anuradha Vikram photographed by Pau S. Pescador
I am a writer, curator, and educator based in Los Angeles. As a curator and critic of contemporary art, I work with process-based, public, and participatory art forms, with a focus on transcultural approaches to technology, social engagement, and the body. I am co-curator of the upcoming Getty Pacific Standard Time: Art and Science Initiative exhibition in 2024, Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption with Victoria Vesna and UCLA Art Sci Center. I am co-curator for the 2024 Portland Biennial with Jackie Im at Oregon Contemporary and am developing an exhibition for LACE in 2025.
My 2017 book, Decolonizing Culture, is a collection of seventeen essays addressing questions of race and gender parity in contemporary art spaces. Originally published as columns between 2013 and 2017 through Daily Serving’s #Hashtags column, the text considers the specifics of equality and representation in the context of current events in the field of arts and culture in the United States and internationally. Available for purchase at Sming Sming Books.
My upcoming first novel Use Me at Your Own Risk: Visions from the Darkest Timeline will be released by X Artists Books in spring 2023.
I have curated over 80 exhibitions with regional and international artists over the past decade, notably Sonya Rapoport: Spaces of Life (Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, 2012), Social Fabric (Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles, 2013), Uncommon Terrain (Shulamit Nazarian Gallery, Venice, 2015), and Jaishri Abichandani: Flower-Headed Children (Craft Contemporary, January-May 2022). Live events include eX-aMEN-ing Masculinities with LA Freewaves and Illuminate LA for Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture in 2022.
I am Faculty in the UCLA Department of Art, USC Roski School of Art and Design, and from 2016-2020 I was a member of the Board of Directors of the College Art Association.
As Artistic Director at 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, California from 2014-19, I developed exhibitions and residencies with contemporary American and international artists each year, including curating Carmen Argote: If only it were that easy… co-produced by 18th Street with REDCAT and the Getty for Pacific Standard Time Festival: Live Art LA/LA in 2018; and organizing A Universal History of Infamy: Virtues of Disparity, an exhibition and 15 visiting artist residencies curated by Rita Gonzalez, Jose Luis Blondet, and Pilar Tompkins Rivas of LACMA for Pacific Standard Time LA/LA in 2015-17. In 2018-19, I also curated solo exhibitions with Clarissa Tossin, Neha Choksi, Paul Pescador, and Kenneth Tam as part of 18th Street’s quarterly Artist Lab new work commissioning program. Other curatorial staff positions include Worth Ryder Art Gallery, UC Berkeley Department of Art Practice (2009-13), Headlands Center for the Arts (2007-08), and Richmond Art Center (2005-06).
Recent publications include a contribution to As radical, as mother, as salad, as shelter: What should art institutions do now? (New York: Paper Monument, 2018); “Underneath the Black Atlantic: Race and Capital in John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea” (X-TRA, vol. 21, no 3, Spring 2019); “Phenomenology of a Cyborg: Biological and Technical Systems in the Art of Juan Downey” (X-TRA, vol. 20 no. 3, Spring 2018), “Becoming Human: Nam June Paik’s Futuristic Compassion” (X-TRA, vol. 18 no. 1, Fall 2015), “A Brief and Incomplete History of Art and Technology Ventures in the Bay Area 1980-2010” (Afterimage, vol. 41, no. 6, Summer 2014), and “Sonya Rapoport: A Woman’s Place is in the Studio” (Sonya Rapoport: Pairings of Polarities. Terri Cohn, Ed. Berkeley: Heyday, 2012). I am a regular contributor to X-TRA, and have written for ARTnews, KCET Artbound, DAILY SERVING, Hyperallergic, Leonardo, SF Camerawork Journal, Afterimage, Artillery, The Brooklyn Rail, and Open Space, the blog of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
I live in Los Angeles, CA, with my partner, two children, and two cats.
Curative Projects and all work on this site by Anuradha Vikram is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Site design by Katherine Evans
Photo by Brica Wilcox