Christine Shaw is a curator, editor, and educator whose work convenes, enables, and amplifies the transdisciplinary thinking necessary for understanding our current multi-scalar historical moment and co-creating the literacies, skills, and sensibilities required to adapt to the various socio-technical transformations of our contemporary society. She has established an innovative curatorial practice in Canada and is recognized for her experimental exhibition-led inquiries, the commissioning of complex works across all media, and the creation of long-term transdisciplinary and cross-sectoral collaborations performatively staged within and beyond the gallery and the university. Since 2013 she has been the Director/Curator of the Blackwood Gallery at the University of Toronto Mississauga, where she is Associate Professor of Curatorial and Visual Studies.
Shaw has applied her commitment to compositional strategies, epistemic disobedience, and social ecologies to multi-year curatorial projects including Take Care (2016–2018), an exhibition series that unfolded through seven imbricated circuits of care: Labour of Curation, Care Work, Infrastructures & Aesthetics of Mutual Aid, Stewardship, Collective Welfare, Rematriation, and Speculative Planning; Running with Concepts, an event series including The Geologic Edition (2015), The Choreographic Edition (2016), and The Empathic Edition (2018), designed to probe the collaborative potential of learning and situate the gallery and university as a rehearsal space; and The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea (2018–2022), a variegated set of curatorial and editorial instantiations of the Beaufort Scale of Wind Force aimed at fostering a deeper public awareness of the complex entanglements of ecologies of excess, environmental legacies of colonialism, the financialization of nature, contemporary catastrophism, politics of sustainability, climate justice, and hopeful resilience. Recently co-edited volumes include The Work of Wind: Sea (K. Verlag, forthcoming 2022), The Work of Wind: Land (K. Verlag, 2018), and The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge publication series (2018–ongoing).
Beyond the Blackwood, Shaw has presented work at international venues including The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, TIFF Bell Lightbox, and Nuit Blanche (Toronto), La Ferme du Buisson (Paris), Venice Biennale, KRAX: Urban Creativity Forum (Barcelona), Parallel Cities (Chicago), SenseLab/Concordia University (Montreal), Goldsmiths College (London), and MIT (Cambridge), among others. She has an MFA in Visual Art from Western University and a PhD in Social and Political Thought from York University. Shaw is a Research Affiliate & Visiting Scholar in the Art, Culture, Technology program at MIT.
Christine Shaw’s curatorial research at MIT is supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the University of Toronto Mississauga.
