Diverse Discourse

Hesse McGraw is a curator and writer and is Vice President for Exhibitions and Public Programs at the San Francisco Art Institute. At SFAI he directs the Walter and McBean Galleries, and oversees SFAI’s public programs, visiting artists series, and public education programs for youths and adults. From 2008 to 2013 he served as chief curator at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska, where he developed an exhibition program focused on site-specific, immersive, cross-disciplinary, and socially engaged projects. At the Bemis Center he produced two-dozen exhibitions, including major public projects with artists Theaster Gates and Michael Jones McKean. McGraw was formerly associate director of Max Protetch gallery in New York, and was the founding director and curator of Paragraph, which operates under the non-profit Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City, Missouri. He lectures widely and his writing has recently been published in Afterall, Art Papers, Outpost and in diverse exhibition catalogues. Recent awards and grants include an Andy Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellowship, an ArtPlace America grant, a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Artistic Innovation and Collaboration Grant, an NEA Our Town grant, and a Harpo Foundation grant.

Astria Suparak has curated exhibitions, screenings, and performance and music events for art spaces, film festivals, and academic venues internationally, including PS1, The Kitchen, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Eyebeam, Museo Rufino Tamayo, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, and The Liverpool Biennial, as well as for non-art spaces such as roller-skating rinks, elementary schools, sports bars, and ferry boats. Suparak was director of the Pratt Institute Film Series (1997-2000) and Syracuse University’s Warehouse Gallery (2006-2007). As the director and curator of the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University (2008-2014) she curated Keep It Slick: Infiltrating Capitalism with The Yes Men, the first solo exhibition of the internationally renowned culture-jamming group; Whatever It Takes: Steelers Fan Collections, Rituals, and Obsessions, which explored sports fanaticism as a significant form of cultural production; and Alien She, on the lasting impact of the global punk feminist movement Riot Grrrl, among other exhibitions. Described as prescient and “visually and conceptually stunning,” Suparak’s work has been critically acclaimed by The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Artforum, Rhizome, The Village Voice and LA Weekly for its innovative curatorial approaches, “savvy political consciousness,” unique contribution to local and larger cultural spheres, and ability to bridge diverse audiences.

Dan Byers is The Richard Armstrong Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Carnegie Museum of Art, and was co-curator, with Daniel Baumann and Tina Kukielski, of the 2013 Carnegie International. His recent projects at the museum include solo exhibitions of Cathy Wilkes, Ragnar Kjartansson, and James Lee Byars, as well as the group exhibitions Reanimation—featuring William E. Jones, Joachim Koester, and Nashashibi/Skaer; Ordinary Madness, a large-scale, wide-ranging exhibition drawn from the Carnegie’s collection of contemporary art; and the Pittsburgh Biennial, which featured artists such as Lenka Clayton, Zak Prekop, Peggy Ahwesh, and Frank Santoro. Before joining the staff at the Carnegie, Dan was curatorial fellow at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and assistant to the directors at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia. Co-presented by DiverseWorks and Southern Methodist University

Diana Nawi has served as associate curator at Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) since 2012. While at PAMM she has organized newly commissioned projects with Yael Bartana, Nicole Cherubini, Bouchra Khalili, LOS JAICHACKERS (Julio César Morales and Eamon Ore-Giron), and Shana Lutker. In 2014, Nawi organized a new presentation of Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, curated by Elvis Fuentes, and curated the first solo museum presentation of the work of Adler Guerrier. In 2015, she will curate an exhibition of recent work with Iman Issa and a mid-career survey with Nari Ward. Prior to joining PAMM, Nawi worked as assistant curator on the Abu Dhabi Project of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. She holds a BA from the University of California, Los Angeles, and an MA from the Graduate Program in the History of Art at Williams College.