Summary
Madeleine Kennedy is a curator interested in questioning the conventions of exhibition-making, and exploring what exhibitions are capable of being and doing when freed from these conventions. Her research and exhibition-making practice is informed by 10 years’ curatorial experience working with over a dozen diverse arts organisations in the UK and North America, combined with a commitment to bringing exhibition-making and philosophy into dialogue, and exploring the radical potential of disability justice in reimagining exhibition-making practice. Recent curatorial roles include Keeper of Art at Hatton Gallery, Exhibitions Curator at Laing Art Gallery, and Visiting Curator at Western Front, Vancouver. Recent major exhibitions include ‘The Enchanted Interior’; ‘Exploding Collage: Nadia Hebson, Ursula Mayer, Linder Sterling’; ‘Ellen Gallagher | Francis Bacon’; and ‘Modern Visionaries: Van Dyck and the Artists’ Eye'. She is deeply interested in what enables curators to think beyond the hegemonic norms of exhibition-making, and in 2020 was elected to the board of the Art Fund, becoming one of only 3% of trustees under 30 in the UK and contributing her practice-based knowledge to multiple committees and grant-making panels intended to support curatorial research and innovation. She is completing a DPhil (PhD) in curatorial theory and practice at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford.
Exhibition-Making and Curatorial Experience
Until 2018, Madeleine was Keeper of Art and Exhibitions Curator at the Hatton Gallery and Laing Art Gallery respectively, where she developed ambitious contemporary commissioning programmes in close collaboration with the director, and curated over twenty exhibitions and collection displays.
Her curatorial projects for the Laing had an emphasis on fostering relationships with local, national, and international partners, and in 2017 she curated Modern Visionaries: Van Dyck and the Artists Eye for the National Portrait Gallery’s UK-wide tour of Anthony van Dyck’s last known self-portrait, contextualising the painting alongside self-portraits by artists such as Andy Warhol, Chris Ofili and Sarah Lucas that speak to culturally evolving myths of the artist persona. She also played an instrumental role in landmark acquisitions for the gallery, including a piece by Fiona Tan that became the first moving-image work to enter the Laing collection, and a major new painting by Glenn Brown made especially for the Laing.
During her tenure at the Hatton, in addition to stewarding a complex and multimedia collection of modern and contemporary art, she supported the £3.8 million fundraising campaign for and project management of the gallery’s major capital redevelopment. She also devised the contemporary strand of the Hatton’s re-opening exhibition programme, including the exhibitions Ellen Gallagher | Francis Bacon (co-curated with Becky Gee and Clare Gomez), and Exploding Collage: Nadia Hebson, Ursula Mayer, Linder Sterling, which asked how to represent experimental and ephemeral work by female artists since lost due to historical biases in institutional collecting and art histories.
Another key interest explored through her practice is how art and exhibitions participate in the history of ideas, either as a means to consolidate or challenge dominant ideologies and assumptions. Central to this is her commitment to a feminist approach to exhibition-making, both within and beyond the context of exhibitions foregrounding women artists. For example, her critically-acclaimed touring exhibition The Enchanted Interior drew attention to the racialisation, objectification and glamorisation of confinement evident in many beloved paintings by British Orientalist and Pre-Raphaelite artists, confronting these historic works with contemporary works by artists such as Mona Hatoum, Hayv Kahraman, Zineb Sedira, Dorothea Tanning, and Francesca Woodman that subvert this imagery and make vivid its relationship with contemporary violations of women’s rights.
Collaborating closely with artists is central to Madeleine’s practice, and she has curated solo shows and commissions for artists including Marcus Coates, Antony Gormley, Nadia Hebson, Laurence Kavanagh, Kate Liston, Rosie Morris, and Yelena Popova. Her collaboration with artists often focuses on deploying institutional support to facilitate the production of ambitious installations and architectural commissions that might not be possible without it, such as a multi-site touring architectural pavilion by Toby Paterson.
In addition to in-house curator roles, Madeleine has had an independent curatorial practice since 2014, leading and consulting on exhibitions and publication projects with clients including Guildhall Art Gallery, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA) and Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art (NGCA). In 2022 Madeleine was a Visiting Curator at Western Front in Vancouver, working closely with the director on embedding accessibility practices in the development and archiving of projects. In 2022 she also supported archival work at Isaac Julien Studio. She has previous experience in the Modern and Contemporary Curatorial department at Tate Britain, the exhibitions team at Firstsite Gallery, and in exhibitions management for international festivals. From 2015-17 she was a member of the British Art Network’s inaugural Emerging Curators Group from, run in partnership between Tate, Yale University, and the Paul Mellon Centre.
In tandem with her exhibition-making practice, Madeleine is deeply interested in what creates the conditions for structural change in the art sector as a whole, with a particular interest in the role of governance, mentoring and teaching in enabling different voices and ways of thinking to be come to the fore, and she has devised and taught curating curriculums for Sarah Lawrence Programme at Oxford University. As a disabled trustee under 30, she became acutely aware of the lack of diversity on boards, and has since partnered with a number of organisations to provide mentoring to support young people from underrepresented backgrounds gain access to arts professions and governance roles. In 2021 she was a member of the disabled-led Clore Leadership programme Inclusive Cultures.
Current Research
Madeleine is completing a DPhil (PhD) in curatorial theory and practice at the University of Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art. Her research seeks to bring the practice-based insights of artists and exhibition-makers into dialogue with the burgeoning interest in exhibitions from analytic philosophers.
This doctoral research originated in her practice-based observations as an exhibition-maker, noticing the extent to which the same exhibitionary conventions dominate across many different geographical, cultural and institutional contexts. Her approach to questioning these conventions derives from her academic training in philosophy, which instilled a lasting curiosity about the interrelated ontology, epistemology and ethics of exhibitions, along with a frustration that they remain an overlooked topic in aesthetics and philosophy of art. Her commitment to questioning these conventions is informed by a recognition of the harm and exclusion that unthinking habits in exhibition-making can affect, and her belief that imagining otherwise in collaboration with those traditionally underserved by exhibitions – especially those with lived experience of disability – has the scope to draw out exhibitions’ latent potential to be inherently polyvocal and inclusive spaces.
Recognizing the parallels between the philosophical technique of counterfactual reasoning and the activist practice of ‘imagining otherwise’ – both forms of asking ‘what if things were different?’ – she seeks to look beyond precedents from exhibition histories by soliciting thought experiments of ‘imagined exhibitions’ through conversations with artists, curators and activists, guided by her training in Philosophical Enquiry facilitation methods.
Previous research has focused on historiographies of exhibitions, and Madeleine has a continued interest in exploring alternative approaches to documenting exhibitions and writing exhibition histories, including experimental projects utilising architectural models and audio description to honour the spatial, somatic and omnisensory quality of an embodied exhibition experience. She also has a longstanding interest in how exhibitions evolve as they tour from one venue to another, exploring this through case studies of travelling exhibitions, and grappling with the ontological questions that they raise. Her earlier academic work as a philosopher centred on asking how exhibitions could be understood as a medium for thinking through philosophical ideas, including a close engagement with projects by philosopher-curators and attempts to practice exhibitions as philosophy.
Publications and conferences
Madeleine’s publishing and editorial work includes co-editing Kelly Richardson: Pillars of Dawn (Kerber, 2019), and contributing essays to artist monographs on Dan Holdsworth (Hatje Cantz, 2018), John Kippin (Kerber, 2018), and Chad McCail (Distanz, 2021). In 2019 she was awarded a publication grant by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art to develop an ambitious research-led and richly illustrated book to accompany the exhibition The Enchanted Interior, designed by Rafaela Dražić and featuring commissioned essays by Emma Cheatle, Lalla Essaydi, Zeynep Inankur and herself. Her writing on exhibitions and exhibition histories has been published in journals such as Stedelijk Studies and Architectural Research Quarterly. Madeleine has also presented her research on exhibitions and philosophy at conferences in Northern Ireland, Croatia, Portugal and Italy; chaired artist in-conversations; and delivered curator talks in-person and online for a variety of public galleries.
Education
Madeleine holds an MA with Distinction in Curating the Art Museum from The Courtauld Institute of Art, and a first-class MA in Philosophy and Art History from the University of St Andrews.