Dr. Alice Ming Wai Jim appointed CURC

As Concordia University Research Chair (CURC, Tier 1) in Critical Curatorial Studies and Decolonizing Art Institutions, Dr Alice Ming Wai Jim and her team will examine the impact of recent social justice movements, decolonizing methodologies, and the new field of critical race museology on the role of the curator. Professor of Contemporary Art in the Department of Art History and previously Tier 2 CURC in Ethnocultural Art Histories, 2017–2022, Dr Jim has galvanized a new generation of students and scholars in the study of ethnocultural art histories that extends to curatorial studies and critical race museology. Her research on diasporic art in Canada and contemporary Asian art has generated new dialogues within and between the fields of ethnocultural and global art histories, critical race theory, media arts, and curatorial studies. Her current SSHRC-funded curated oral histories project, Afrofuturism and Black Lives Matter in the Canadian art scene, is part of a larger examination of the convergence of Indigenous and Afro-Asian futurism in contemporary art. Prior to her appointment at Concordia, Dr Jim was Curator of the Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Centre A where she curated the group exhibition and symposium Redress Express: Chinese Restaurants and the Head Tax Issue in Canadian Art about the era before and during the Chinese Exclusion Act (1923–1947) which was passed 100 years ago this year (2023). She also convened the international 2004 conference and exhibition Mutations<>Connections: Cultural (Ex)Changes in Asian Diasporas, whose 20^th anniversary will be marked and revisited as part of the new CURC’s research activities to interrogate global Asian diasporic art and curatorial developments. Dr Jim is also founding co-editor-in-chief of the international journal Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas (ADVA), published by Brill (Leiden, NL) in association with the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art (Concordia University) and the Asian/Pacific/American Institute (New York University). She is a member of the College of New Scholars of the Royal Society of Canada and recipient in 2022 of UAAC’s inaugural Award for the advancement of equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility.