Doctoral Candidate Ashley Lindeman Selected as 2022 Emerging Curator at PLUG Gallery
Doctoral candidate Ashley Lindeman was recently selected to be the 2022 Emerging Curator at PLUG Gallery in Kansas City, Missouri. During the curatorial residency, Ashley will work with mentor Jade Powers (Curator at the Harn Museum in Gainesville) to curate an exhibition that will be open to the public from October 21 through November 17, 2022, with a digital catalogue posted online shortly thereafter.
The exhibition, titled Muralism: Inside Out, seeks to merge the worlds of public muralism and the private gallery. The exhibition will feature six works of art in PLUG’s interior gallery that relate to murals that have already been created for the greater Kansas City metro. The featured murals speak to ideas of inclusivity with themes on LGBTQIA, Black Lives Matter, immigration, and acknowledging the appropriation of Native land in the United States. In addition to the works of art inside the gallery, PLUG will commission a collaborative mural for an exterior wall of the building where the PLUG gallery resides. Some artists Ashley hopes to feature in the exhibition are Jared Horman, Emily Alvarez, JT Daniels, and Emily Ding. Ashley received a $1,000 stipend as well as a $1,000 budget to cover exhibition costs.
Through this experience, Ashley hopes to not only develop her curatorial skills in contemporary art, but she also seeks to build meaningful connections between 1930s muralism and contemporary mural painting in the streets today. In her dissertation “L’Arte Murale: Italian Muralism and the Expansion of Empire, 1932–1945,” which she is completing under the direction of Dr. Adam Jolles, she examines materiality and iconography in modern Italian murals and how they relate to the Italian fascist empire. Because muralism is such a democratic and inclusive practice, it has soared in popularity in many cities all over the world. Ashley’s expertise in muralism, both modern and contemporary, will allow her to discuss the practice’s trajectory from the twentieth century to today.
