Exchange as a Symmetrical Gesture: Visiting Curator Program Celebration

School of Art Gallery, University of Manitoba

Whit Forrester, The Electric Universe Theory. Open Structure (2022–2023), curated by Grace Deveney. Photo: Karen Asher.

Exchange as a Symmetrical Gesture

Thursday, October 16, 2025
7 – 9pm | Doors 6:30pm
Desautels Concert Hall, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg
Admission is free and open to all. Registration required.
Visit Registration Page

Celebrate the culmination of the School of Art Gallery’s Visiting Curator Program with an evening of readings, dialogue, and community. The event opens with a reading by artist Erika DeFreitas, followed by a curatorial panel with Grace Deveney, Shalaka Jadhav, and Lillian O’Brien Davis, moderated by artist Nic Wilson. Reception will follow, featuring the launch of three new program publications. Light refreshments | Cash bar.

About the Visiting Curator Program

Launched in Summer 2021, the Visiting Curator Program has been a catalyst for three international-calibre exhibitions and has deepened contemporary art discourse in the Prairies. It has given students, faculty, and the community meaningful opportunities to engage with curators charting new trajectories in the field, as well as the artists whose works were featured.

Curated Exhibitions

Open Structure – Grace Deveney (Nov 3, 2022 – Jan 28, 2023)
The Performance of Shadows – Lillian O’Brien Davis (Feb 16 – Apr 29, 2023)
To Broadcast is to Scatter – Shalaka Jadhav (Nov 30, 2023 – Feb 10, 2024)

Curator & Artist Biographies

Grace Deveney is a curator and art historian who holds a PhD in Art History from Northwestern University. She is the David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Associate Curator of Photography and Media at the Art Institute of Chicago. Previously, she was Associate Curator of the fifth iteration of Prospect, a New Orleans-based contemporary art triennial, titled Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow (2021), and Assistant Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Exhibitions at the MCA include a mid-career survey of the work of painter Christina Quarles (2021), Direct Message: Art, Language, and Power (2019), and Groundings (2018; with Tara Aisha Willis), as well as presentations of the work of Paul Pfeiffer and Amanda Williams (both 2017).

Shalaka Jadhav is a writer, researcher, and curator who spent their childhood between cities in India and Dubai, before moving to a neighbourhood spitting distance from Ontario’s largest mall. Trained as an urban planner, Shalaka has bridged critical narratives of belonging and resilience through climate impact projects at local, national, and international levels, and has been named a Future of Good Young Impact Leader. Shalaka’s research and curatorial interests explore spatial positionality and critical geographies of grief, public memory, and queer ecologies, as evidenced in exhibitions they have curated in Halifax, Winnipeg, Guelph, and Toronto. They have held roles at OCAD University and The Blackwood, and co-direct Textile, a hyper-local arts collective in Waterloo Region that supports writers and artists through mentorship, publishing, and curation. Shalaka splits their time on Haldimand Tract and Treaty 1 territory—and always orders dessert.

Lillian O’Brien Davis is the Associate Curator at the MacKenzie Art Gallery. She previously held the position of Curator of Collections and Contemporary Art Engagement at the Goldfarb Gallery of York University. She has curated independent projects at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Susan Hobbs Gallery (Toronto), and the School of Art Gallery at the University of Manitoba. Her writing has appeared in BlackFlash Magazine, Peripheral Review, Canadian Art online, C Magazine, and RACAR Art History Journal.

Erika DeFreitas’s interdisciplinary practice includes performance, photography, video, installation, textiles, drawing, and writing. Placing emphasis on gesture, process, the body, documentation, and paranormal phenomena, DeFreitas mines concepts of loss, post-memory, legacy, and objecthood. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. DeFreitas holds a Master of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto.

Nic Wilson is an artist, born in Wolastoqiyik territory (Fredericton, NB) in 1988. He graduated with a BFA from Mount Allison University, Mi’kmaq territory, in 2012, and an MFA from the University of Regina, Treaty Four Territory, in 2019, where he was a SSHRC graduate fellow. They have shown work across Canada and participated in projects with Remai Modern, Plug In ICA, Art Souterrain, and the MacKenzie Art Gallery. Internationally, they have shown with Venice International Performance Art Week, Casa de la Primera Imprenta de América (Mexico City), NADA (Bogotá), and OpenArt (Örebro, Sweden). Working across media, Wilson creates videos, texts, performances, and artist books. Their work often engages time, queer lineage, decay, and the distance between art practice and literature. In 2021, they were long-listed for the Sobey Art Award. They were the 2022 writer-in-residence for G44 Centre for Contemporary Photography.

The Visiting Curator Program is generously supported by Dr. Michael F.B. Nesbitt, whose contributions to the arts and community-building are deeply felt throughout Winnipeg and especially at the University of Manitoba.

School of Art Gallery
University of Manitoba
255 ARTlab, 180 Dafoe Road
Winnipeg, MB R3T 2N2
gallery@umanitoba.ca | 204-474-9322
www.umanitoba.ca/art/gallery

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