EventsThe New Social Environment#314

Curating in the Blockchain Landscape

Featuring Christiana Ine-Kimba Boyle, Anika Meier, and Kelani Nichole moderated by Charlotte Kent

Monday, June 7, 2021 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

Join us for a discussion with Christiana Ine-Kimba Boyle, Anika Meier, and Kelani Nichole led by Rail Editor-at-Large Charlotte Kent. We conclude with a poetry reading.

In this Talk

Auction houses are curating shows of blockchain art. A museum is set to open a show on June 10. Galleries are presenting exhibitions of new works. Curators are presenting and reinventing how we understand blockchain art after a whirlwind spring of rollercoaster sales.

This panel with curators from varying institutions invites us to understand the role curators play, especially as so much blockchain hype is around circumventing 'gatekeepers' and decentralizing the art market. In this liminal moment when blockchain is disrupting many traditionally held concepts in the various art worlds, what role can curators play? How is curating itself changing? In what ways can curators help artists navigate the distributed space of blockchain? What problems are curators noticing and do they want to address how blockchain is entering our art worlds?

Watch Art on the Blockchain: Debates on NFTs & Crypto Art »

Christiana Ine-Kimba Boyle

Photo by Shaniqwa Jarvis

Curator and art dealer based in New York City, Christiana Ine-Kimba Boyle was recently appointed the title of Director of Online Sales at Pace Gallery—managing the gallery’s digital helm and recent foray into the NFT market. Christiana made her curatorial debut in April with the group exhibition Black Femme: Sovereign of WAP and the Virtual Realm, which featured work by six black female-identifying artists: Caitlin Cherry, Delphine Desane, Emily Manwaring, Kenya (Robinson), Sydney Vernon, and Qualeasha Wood. The exhibition supported a deconstructive discourse around femininity, sexuality, and gender politics through a post-internet lens.

Anika Meier

Writer and curator Anika Meier was the author of a column on art and social media for the German art magazine Monopol and now writes a column on digital art for Kunstforum. Her most recent exhibitions include the exhibition series The Artist is Online curated with Johann König at KÖNIG GALERIE / KÖNIG DIGITAL. The first exhibition in this series by Manuel Rossner can be visited via the app KÖNIG GALERIE. Other recent exhibitions include Berlin, Augmented Berlin with Highsnobiety and Link in Bio. Art after Social Media (2019/2020) at the Museum of Fine Arts in Leipzig. Her texts have appeared in Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Welt, Spiegel Online, Kunstforum, Numéro Berlin, der Freitag, Mindstate Malibu, among others.

Kelani Nichole

Technologist and media art specialist based in Los Angeles, Kelani Nichole works with product teams and startups, and founded an experimental media art gallery called TRANSFER which explores simulation and expanded practice. TRANSFER aims to elevate emerging media in contemporary art, with a focus around critical encounters with software. The gallery was founded in Brooklyn in 2013, and launched the international exhibition series TRANSFER Download in 2016. In 2019 the gallery opened a location in Los Angeles. Nichole and the gallery have been featured in publications including Artforum, the New York Times, and Artnews, and placed works with prominent media art collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Thoma Foundation.

Charlotte Kent

Associate professor of visual culture at Montclair State University Charlotte Kent, PhD, is an Editor-at-Large for the Brooklyn Rail, and a contributor to assorted books on art and technology, including as co-editor of Contemporary Absurdities, Existential Crises, and Visual Art (Intellect Books, 2024), co-author of Midnight Moment: A Decade of Artists in Times Square (Monacelli Press, 2024), and editor of Generation to Generation (Vetro, 2026). She is the recipient of grants from NEH and Google Art + Machine Intelligence, with a forthcoming book on contemporary art and technoabsurdity. She is a member of the College Art Association’s Committee on Intellectual Property.

We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨