CALL FOR PROPOSALS: GUEST CURATOR

The Beall Center for Art + Technology is seeking proposals to curate its 25th Anniversary exhibition in Fall 2025. Since its opening in 2000, the Beall Center has exhibited over sixty exhibitions featuring hundreds of artists, scientists, and educators. We have hosted over a dozen residencies through our Black Box Projects program (est. 2011) and have served thousands of UCI and Orange County community members with STEAM-focused public programs. The Beall Center’s curatorial focus presents a diverse range of innovative, world-renowned artists, both national and international, who work with experimental and interactive media. For artists, the Beall Center serves as a proving ground—a place between the artist’s studio and the art museum—and allows them to work with new technologies in their early stages of development. We are interested in proposals that do not exclusively underscore Beall Center’s exhibition history but also reinforce our curatorial strategy and renewed vision toward the next 25 years. Attractive proposals will include provocative artworks by artists with innovative use of today’s technologies: applying different forms of science and technology to engage the senses; building innovative scholarly relationships and community collaborations between artists, scientists and technologists; and encouraging research and development of art forms that can affect the future; etc.

The selected curator will work closely alongside artistic director and curator David Familian, who has shepherded Beall Center’s stellar programs in the past two decades, conducting an oral history, and will be responsible for independent research of the Beall Center’s archive, writing an essay for the catalog, contacting, and sourcing all materials from artists, writing exhibition texts, training student docents, and developing a public program with the support of Beall Center’s associate director. 

We encourage curatorial proposals from creative professionals with a robust curatorial practice who are unafraid of experimentation, have experience in navigating institutional roadblocks while fostering artistic spirit, and have demonstrated background working with new media artists.

We offer an honorarium of $7,000 (in increments of four payments) plus $3,000 essay fee, and a travel budget up to $3,000 for a part-time, remote, two-year contract term (2024- 2026). Exhibition budget for shipping, installation, artist/loan fees will also be provided as well as a separate budget for a commissioned work via Black Box Project artist residency. 

ELIGIBILITY: U.S. Citizens and international artists, collectives, curators (independent or affiliated) are eligible to submit proposals. Priority is given to cross-disciplinary projects. Current UC-affiliated faculty, students or employees are ineligible to apply. Former UC employees are also ineligible to apply, depending on the separation period as outlined in  Article IV of the California Public Contract Code.

AVAILABLE FACILITIES: The Beall Center is a 2,500 square foot black box with a highly configurable network grid, and connectivity to gigabit speed Ethernet. An expanded off-site location as a secondary site may also be an option. 

DEADLINE FOR APPLICATION: December 31, 2023 

NOTIFICATION: March 1, 2024 

HOW TO SUBMIT: 

Proposals should be submitted in electronic format only, a single pdf document that includes: 

1) Contact Information (name, address, email, phone)

2) Curatorial statement (500 words max) that addresses the following: 

     - Your interest in the Beall Center for Art + Technology

     - How does your curatorial practice fit within a broader spectrum of issues in the field?

     - What other projects have influenced your thinking or dialogues do you want to engage with? 

3) Resume or curriculum vitae with list of publications, writings or URL links

4) Proposed project description (1000 words max.)

5) Proposed checklist with images or URL links

6) Proposed sample budget

7) Please be prepared to provide two references; you may be contacted during the review process to provide these.

Email a single PDF to include any images with the subject line Guest Curator to Fatima Manalili, Associate Director at fatima.m@uci.edu.

For inquiries, please send to Jesse Colin Jackson, Executive Director at j.c.jackson@uci.edu.