Howie Chen

Howie Chen is a New York–based curator involved in collaborative art production and research.  Chen is a founder of Dispatch, a curatorial production office and project space founded in New York City, later transitioning to a peripatetic exhibition model.  Dispatch offers a model for curatorial production: an office for receiving and originating exhibitions, projects, and concepts treated as time-sensitive transmissions.

He has organized exhibitions and programs at the Whitney Museum of American Art, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, The Kitchen, Circuit (Switzerland), IMO (Copenhagen) among others.

In 2003, with artist Mika Tajima, he formed New Humans, a moniker for collaborations with musicians, artists and designers.  New Humans was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial—a collaboration with Vito Acconci and musician C. Spencer Yeh—and more recently projects at SFMOMA and South London Gallery with collaborator Charles Atlas.

In 2010, Chen co-founded JEQU, a research project to assess how sociological and cultural economic approaches to art world debates can augment artistic critique.  Past program presentations include a lecture by Olav Velthuis, seminar with Luc Boltanski, and exhibitions at USC Roski School of Fine Art and Formalist Sidewalk Poetry Club.

Chen also launched Collectionof, a new online platform for presenting the diverse creative productions of international artists, art producers and art spaces.

In addition to curatorial activities, Chen has been a Critic at the Rhode Island School of Design in the Painting Department and is currently teaching at the New York University Steinhardt School.  He holds a degree in economics from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program as a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow.