Ellen Yoshi Tani- 2020
Ellen Yoshi Tani is an art historian and Assistant Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, where she has presented the work of Nina Chanel Abney, Huma Bhabha, and is developing an exhibition with Tschabalala Self for January 2020. Previously she served as Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, where she taught classes with the museum’s collection and curated exhibitions, including Second Sight: the Paradox of Vision in Contemporary Art, a major exhibition and publication that centered issues of race and disability within histories of conceptual art. Her research interests engage the fields of American art, black studies, race and ethnicity, feminism, design, and conceptual art, and she earned her PhD in Art History from Stanford University in 2015. In addition to regularly presenting her work at academic conferences, Tani has led workshops on object-based pedagogy and delivered guest lectures in interdisciplinary contexts. She was invited as a 2018 juror for the Maine-based publication The Chart’s visiting critic program, Hewnoaks Artist Colony, and the Maine Percent for Arts Program, and has served as a guest critic for Tufts SFMA thesis reviews. She has contributed to exhibition monographs of Charles Gaines and Senga Nengudi, and has written for Common Field, Apricota Journal, and online platforms such as The Chart, Temporary Art Review, and Art Practical. Her current publication projects include a forthcoming article in Art Journal on the work of Glenn Ligon and Steve Reich, and an essay on Senga Nengudi’s relationship with Japanese culture for an anthology on transnational feminism in the arts.
