ABOUT the chair
Concordia University recognizes and values the role played by Research Chairs (“Chairholders”) in creating and mobilizing knowledge with the aim of achieving research excellence. As leaders in their fields, Chairholders play a critical role in deepening our knowledge base and in strengthening our teaching, the training of highly qualified personnel, and research capacity. As catalysts and builders, they contribute to the university's positioning in given areas of scholarly pursuit and to the enhancement of the research training environment.
Alice Ming Wai jim, phd
Research chair IN Critical Curatorial Studies and Decolonizing Art Institutions, Concordia university
As the Concordia University Research Chair (CURC, Tier 1) in Critical Curatorial Studies and Decolonizing Art Institutions starting June 2023, 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 emerging 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. She also convened the international 2004 conference and exhibition Mutations<>Connections: Cultural (Ex)Changes in Asian Diasporas, whose 20th anniversary will be marked and revisited as part of the new CURC’s research activities to interrogate global Asian diasporic art and curatorial developments.
Since 2000, Dr Jim has curated exhibitions of over sixty artists of colour and Indigenous artists and organized major scholarly events within academic settings and for the broader arts community in Canada and internationally. Co-investigator of the SSHRC and FQRSC-funded Trans-Atlantic Platform: Social Innovation project, Worlding Public Cultures (2020–2023), she organized a team of Montreal faculty and students from Concordia, UQAM and UdM to participate in international academies in Ottawa, Amsterdam, London, Heidelberg, and Montreal, convening WPC 2023, Worlding Tiohtià:ke/ Montreal: Bridging Knowledges, Practices, and Beings to critically examine the ways in which global, transnational and transcultural public narratives are being represented in universities, museums, and other spaces of art and culture.
In 2022, Jim co-organized the Pacific Basin Institute’s Decolonizing Art and Curatorial Practice Lecture Series and was a core member of Rutgers University’s’ Decolonizing Curatorial and Museum Studies and Public Humanities Project. A core scholar of the NYU Global Asia/Pacific Art Exchange (GAX) since 2014, she co-convened GAX 2019 Tiohtiá:ke (Montreal): Asian Indigenous Relations in Contemporary Art, which brought together sixty Asian diasporic and Indigenous researchers, artists, and students from Samoa, Hawaii, Australia, across Canada, and the US to investigate the topic of curating hospitality and care discourses in contemporary art.
In 2018, she coedited the special issue “What is Critical Curating?” for RACAR with Dr Marie Fraser. 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.
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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. She also convened the international 2004 conference and exhibition Mutations<>Connections: Cultural (Ex)Changes in Asian Diasporas, whose 20th anniversary will be marked and revisited as part of the new CURC’s research activities to interrogate global Asian diasporic art and curatorial developments.
Since 2000, Dr Jim has curated exhibitions of over sixty artists of colour and Indigenous artists and organized major scholarly events within academic settings and for the broader arts community in Canada and internationally. Co-investigator of the SSHRC and FQRSC-funded Trans-Atlantic Platform: Social Innovation project, Worlding Public Cultures (2020–2023), she organized a team of Montreal faculty and students from Concordia, UQAM and UdM to participate in international academies in Ottawa, Amsterdam, London, Heidelberg, and Montreal, convening WPC 2023, Worlding Tiohtià:ke/ Montreal: Bridging Knowledges, Practices, and Beings to critically examine the ways in which global, transnational and transcultural public narratives are being represented in universities, museums, and other spaces of art and culture.
In 2022, Jim co-organized the Pacific Basin Institute’s Decolonizing Art and Curatorial Practice Lecture Series and was a core member of Rutgers University’s’ Decolonizing Curatorial and Museum Studies and Public Humanities Project. A core scholar of the NYU Global Asia/Pacific Art Exchange (GAX) since 2014, she co-convened GAX 2019 Tiohtiá:ke (Montreal): Asian Indigenous Relations in Contemporary Art, which brought together sixty Asian diasporic and Indigenous researchers, artists, and students from Samoa, Hawaii, Australia, across Canada, and the US to investigate the topic of curating hospitality and care discourses in contemporary art.
In 2018, she coedited the special issue “What is Critical Curating?” for RACAR with Dr Marie Fraser. 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.
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