Curatorial Talks: Ellen Tani and Nolan Jimbo

In an ongoing series of virtual conversations, Mana Contemporary and Monira Foundation invite leading curators, artists, writers, and art professionals to discuss and comment on the arts and culture at large. 

This month, Nolan Jimbo hosts curator Ellen Tani in a discussion of their work. They will speak about respective curatorial practices–both of which focus on the relationship between race, abstraction and conceptual art.  

Nolan Jimbo is the Marjorie Susman Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where he recently organized the exhibitions Chicago Works: Gregory Bae and Interiors, as well as performances by Kioto Aoki and Kikù Hibino. Previously, he was a curatorial fellow at MASS MoCA, where he curated Close to You, a group exhibition premised on queer of color kinship. His research focuses on Asian American and Asian diasporic artists, performance studies, and queer theory. Born and raised in Los Angeles, he received his MA from the Williams Graduate Program in Art History and his BA in art history from Tufts University.

Ellen Tani is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution, and will join the faculty at Rochester Institute of Technology in 2023. An art historian, curator and critic, her approach to contemporary art history is grounded in questions of race, disability, gender, and social and political engagement, both in her writing, which has appeared in Art Journal, American Quarterly, and Panorama, and in her curatorial work at the ICA Boston and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Her current book project focuses on the conceptual practices of Africa American artists in the 1970s and 1980s. She received her BA from Dartmouth College and her PhD from Stanford University.