Knowledge- and relationship-building opportunities for curators.
About
MOSS PROJECTS: CURATORIAL LEARNING + RESEARCH PROGRAM is an itinerant pedagogical platform supporting inquiry and learning by and with Indigenous, underrepresented, racialized, and allied curators through peer-to-peer learning and mentorship. As an alternative or parallel program to academic curatorial training, Moss Projects offers knowledge- and relationship-building opportunities for curators committed to peeling away the colonial layers of the art museum. In its current stage of development and prototyping, Moss Projects is exploring innovative pedagogies through the implementation of a series of Curatorial Gatherings.
Guiding Objectives
Valuing diverse knowledge systems and modes of organization beyond, and in dialogue with, dominant parameters of curation;
Recognizing the urgency with which we must learn to work otherwise in the curatorial field by developing shareable resources that speak to new, sustainable models for the future;
Sharing knowledge through reciprocal learning, participants agree to share knowledge with respective co-workers and colleagues and actively participate in expanding curatorial practice;
Providing non-cost-prohibitive access to professional development for diverse curators;
Building strategies for understanding and addressing the systemic challenges across the arts sector;
Prioritizing flexibility and accommodation for participant obligations (family, community, work) or restrictions (time, money);
Testing pedagogical models through Curatorial Intensives alongside modes not-yet identified;
Establishing social justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion as essential to current curatorial discourse towards the shifting of curatorial practice beyond colonial legacies and systemic challenges.
Team
MICHELLE JACQUES is a curator and writer who specializes in Canadian art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Since 2021, she has been the Director of Exhibitions and Collections/Chief Curator at Remai Modern in Saskatoon.
She began her curatorial career at the Art Gallery of Ontario (1995–2012), where she held various positions in the Contemporary and Canadian art departments before departing to become the Chief Curator at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria in 2012. Her recent curatorial projects include Denyse Thomasos: Just Beyond, co-curated with Renee van der Avoird and Sally Frater (AGO and Remai Modern, 2022–23 and traveling); and Ken Lum: Death and Furniture, co-curated with Johan Lundh (Remai Modern and AGO, 2022).
Over the course of her career, she has curated and written about the work of numerous contemporary artists, and she maintains a strong research interest in Canadian modernism, cultivated during her graduate studies. Jacques was the recipient of the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts for Outstanding Contribution in 2024 and the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award in Curatorial Excellence in 2022. She is currently the president of the board of the AAMC Foundation – a New York-based organization that supports and promotes the work of art curators around the world.
TOBY LAWRENCE is a curator and writer based in the lands of the lək̓ʷəŋən people/Victoria, BC. She has worked in public art museums and artist-run centres for over 15 years, joining the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria in 2024 as Curator of Contemporary Art. In 2023, Lawrence was appointed to the BC Arts Council and has held previous positions as Curator of Outdoor Art at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and Curator at Open Space Arts Society.
Her curation and scholarship center collaborative, feminist, and relational approaches. Recent projects Architectures of Protection (AGGV, 2025) and Wayfinders, the ones we breathe with (Open Space, 2023), a series of exhibitions and public art projects that included Tanya Lukin Linklater’s Hair Prints, Camille Georgeson-Usher’s Until it Swells, Paul de Guzman’s Laro na Tayo—Let’s Play, and a curatorial residency with Josh Tengan, explore the potential of gathering and long-term relationship-building inside and outside of gallery spaces. Such considerations equally extend to her contributions as a co-organizer of the UBC Okanagan Indigenous Art Intensive (2016-20), a curator for the inaugural Contingencies of Care Residency hosted by OCADU, Toronto Biennial of Art, and BUSH gallery (2020) and as a curatorial resident of the Otis College of Art and Design Emerging Curators Retreat, Los Angeles (2019). She holds an MA in Art History & Theory from the University of British Columbia and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies with a focus on curatorial practice from the University of British Columbia Okanagan, supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellowship.
Support
We acknowledge the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts Strategic Innovations Cultivate grant and British Columbia Arts Council Visual Arts Project grant.
