Southern Curators Summit
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Southern Curators Summit
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October 8-10, 2025
Lake City, SC
Presented by South Arts + ArtFields
About the Summit:
South Arts, in partnership with ArtFields, will present the Southern Curators Summit in Lake City, SC October 8-10, 2025. The Summit brings Southern curators working in visual culture together for high-level discussions about the current state of the arts in the South and to form a new vision for the arts and culture in this region.
Curating Against the Canon is a call to challenge dominant narratives and make space for voices historically pushed to the margins. It recognizes that emerging voices and new media are actively reshaping curatorial authority, methodologies, and practices, disrupting long-standing conventions at the core of curatorial work.
Key Note Speaker: Heather Pontonio
Heather Pontonio serves as the Senior Program Director at the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, leading the national strategy and administration of its Art Program. Her work is dedicated to advancing professional practices for contemporary art curators and artists nationwide. Notably, she played a pivotal role in launching Artists Thrive, a national initiative designed to evaluate and improve conditions for artists across the country. Ms. Pontonio earned a Master's in Public Administration from New York University and a Bachelor's in Arts Administration from SUNY Fredonia. Her career began in New York City with positions at the Little Orchestra Society, Irish Repertory Theatre, and Cherry Lane Theatre, and later included serving as Associate Vice President of Grants at the Arts & Science Council (Charlotte-Mecklenburg). A 2015 P.L.A.C.E.S. fellow with The Funders’ Network, she also co-chaired the Grantmakers in the Arts’ Support for Individual Artists Committee (2015-2017) and currently serves on the boards of VIA Collaborative Arts and the Research Advisory Board for the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP).
Summit Goals:
- To initiate conversations among curators working in the South, across all types of institutions, and individuals working independently who present visual culture.
- To explore and promote connectivity between and amongst curators who support contemporary southern artists and culture in all its iterations.
- To strengthen the South’s position as a great place to live and as a cultural hub that rivals other regions in the country. Forbes’ 2024 list of 25 best places to live and retire in the United States includes 8 southern cities!
Why Lake City, South Carolina?
The Summit takes place in Lake City, South Carolina, the home of ArtFields. Lake City is the quintessential small southern town, once rooted in a thriving agricultural past, followed by severe economic decline. Searching for new beginnings, the first ArtFields event was launched in 2012 as an experiment, and today, 13 years later, the whole city has transformed, embracing the arts as a catalyst to economic development. ArtFields, centered in the heart of downtown Lake City, produces dynamic programming to foster cultural tourism. This includes its signature annual event, a nine-day art competition and festival, which brings thousands of visitors throughout the country to admire, buy, and connect with contemporary art made in the Southeast. Visual culture and creative innovation are the anchors for lines of progress in Lake City, which makes it the perfect location to host the Southern Curators Summit, a creative sector think tank visualizing pathways towards fortified communities, strong communication, and industry-leading practice.
2025 Agenda
Wednesday, October 8, 2025
- Afternoon Arrival of Guests- Registration | 1:00 - 5:00 p.m.
Location:
Acline Studios - 132 North Acline Street, Lake City, SC 29560- Reception | 5:30 - 7:30 p.m.
Location:
Acline Studios - 132 North Acline Street, Lake City, SC 29560
Thursday, October 9, 2025
- Keynote | 10:15 - 11:15 a.m.
Session Leader:
Heather Pontonio, Senior Program Director
Emily Hall Tremaine FoundationLocation:
Acline Studios - 132 North Acline Street, Lake City, SC 29560Learn how the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation's funding strategy is shaped by its commitment to artists and curators. Discover how their Curators on the Cusp portfolio, including the Exhibition Award and Curatorial Advancement Grants, are the direct result of in-depth research and ongoing conversations with those on the front lines of the contemporary art world.
- Writing Without a Pen | 11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
Session Leader:
TK Smith, Curator, Arts of Africa and the African Diaspora
Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory UniversityLocation:
Acline Studios - 132 North Acline Street, Lake City, SC 29560Smith will lead a session confronting the implausibility for curators to write critically, thoughtfully, and accessibly in an era of disappearing publishing outlets, institutional censorship, and rising anti-intellectualism, all while lacking time and resources. With this opportunity to commune, Smith will bring participants together to strategize how to put pen to paper when scholarship feels most urgent.
- Culture War(s) | 1:30 - 2:30 p.m.
Session Leader:
Geno Rodriquez, Founder, Director & Curator Alternative Museum, 1975-2001Location:
OT Hall, ZOOM SessionThe well-publicized Culture Wars of the 1980s and 1990s centered on the influence of artists that challenged the acceptable norms within the American arts community. Artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Andreas Serrano became central figures and political targets.
In this session, Geno Rodriguez will lead a discussion on how the historical culture wars have always been far more complex than just that of the 1980s and 1990s. He will address other ongoing culture issues that were never fully resolved that impacted the arts and how resolving issues like self-censorship, DEI and creative curating can tackle some of the complexities we are still facing today.- Art in the Age of Intelligent Machines | 2:45 - 3:45 p.m.
Session Leaders:
Mark Tribe, Artist & Eric Standley, Professor of Studio Art, Virginia TechLocation:
Acline Studios - 132 North Acline Street, Lake City, SC 29560Artists Mark Tribe and Eric Standley discuss their practice and their relationship to the artworld as the age of technology further encroaches media. Speaking about their own art, collaboration with curators, and the musings of AI taking over the world, their session will invite discussion from the audience to speak to the terrors and delights in the age of intelligent machines.
- Abstract: Refusal as Responsibility: An Anarcho-Punk Praxis for Personal and Institutional Change | 4:00 - 5:00 p.m.
Session Leader:
Miranda Kyle, Curator of Indigenous Arts of the Americas
Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory UniversityLocation:
Jones-Carter Gallery - 105 Henry St, Lake City, SC 29560This session focuses on a curatorial practice that began outside the museum walls. Rooted in community, culture, and collaboration, Kyle will discuss her approach to curating which seeks to decenter the singular voice of the curator and instead cultivate spaces where communities, artists, and cultural bearers are not only heard but fully supported. Kyle will trace the trajectory of her work across public art, advocacy and activism, institutional transformation, and Indigenous partnerships to illustrate what it means to curate against the canon.
- Infinite Witness Table: community dinner | community dialogue | collective engagement: 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
Session Leader:
Michael Urueta and Rayshad Dorsey - Co-Curators of Rural WitnessesLocation:
TRAX Visual Art Center - 122 Sauls St, Lake City, SC 29560The The Infinite Witness Table is an act of commune, a physical act of remembrance. Participatory in nature, and embracing of the messy. Similar to the pastime of physical scrapbooking, this act asks participants to respond to prompts, questions, ideas, and conversations to create a physical scrapbook at an infinite scale. The table is the canvas, and the witness. Items brought by participants and items provided at the table should physically weave into the tapestry that is the Infinite Witness Table.
Friday, October 10, 2025
- Activating Collections, Establishing Dialogues, and Creating Visibility: Puerto Rican Art and Community | 9:00 - 10:00 a.m.
Session Leader:
Dr. Gisela Carbonell, Ph.D., Curator,
Rollins Museum of Art at Rollins College, Winter Park FloridaLocation:
OT Hall - 130 North Acline Street, Lake City, SC 29560This case study of the Rollins Museum of Art in Winter Park, FL will focus on curatorial strategies used to activate the museum’s collection to create connections with the Puerto Rican community in Central Florida. By addressing the lack of representation in the museum's holdings, Carbonell will discuss how this strategy was used to leverage engagement with the Puerto Rican community leading to the transformation of the museum into a bilingual institution.
- Curated Conversations | 10:15 - 11:15 a.m.
Location:
OT Hall - 130 North Acline Street, Lake City, SC 29560- Curators as Catalysts | 11:30 a.m. - 12:45 p.m.
Session Leader:
Sharon Louden, artist, educator, advocate for artists, editor of the Living and Sustaining a Creative Life, and the Founder and Director of the Institute for Sustained CreativityLocation:
OT Hall - 130 North Acline Street, Lake City, SC 29560This session will explore the evolving role of curators today, highlighting how they can be catalysts for new models of engagement, collaboration, and sustainability in the arts. By highlighting examples of contemporary practices, exhibitions, alternative partnerships, and independent initiatives, this session will identify different pathways toward sustaining a creative life as a curator. Anchored by essays from Storytellers of Art Histories: Living and Sustaining a Creative Life, edited by Dr. Alpesh Kantilal Patel and Yasmeen Siddiqui, the conversation will emphasize diverse voices and approaches shaping the future of curatorial practice.
Learn More: Storytellers of Art Histories
Speakers and Panelists
Sharon Louden
Sharon Louden is an artist, educator, advocate for artists, editor of the Living and Sustaining a Creative Life series of books, and the Artistic Director of the Chautauqua Visual Arts at Chautauqua Institution.
Sharon graduated with a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Yale University School of Art. Her work has been exhibited in numerous venues including the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Drawing Center, Carnegie Mellon University, Weisman Art Museum, National Gallery of Art, Birmingham Museum of Art, Weatherspoon Art Museum and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.
Louden's work is held in major public and private collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Art, Neuberger Museum of Art, Arkansas Arts Center, Yale University Art Gallery, Weatherspoon Art Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others.
Louden is also active on boards and committees of various not-for-profit art organizations and volunteers her time to artists to further their careers. Sharon is also a consultant for Creative Capital and the Joan Mitchell Foundation. She is the editor of Living and Sustaining a Creative Life: Essays by 40 Working Artists, The Artist as Culture Producer, Last Artist Standing and the Senior Editor of a 10-book series of books focusing on amplifying voices of individuals in the arts.
She has received funding for her book tours from the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, the Ford Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts among many other organizations. You can find more at sharonlouden.com, livesustain.org and art.chq.org.
TK Smith
TK Smith is a curator, writer, and cultural historian. He currently serves as Curator, Arts of Africa and the African Diaspora, Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University. Previously, Smith served as Assistant Curator: Art of the African Diaspora at the Barnes Foundation. Recent curatorial projects include the 2025 Mississippi Invitational: Call Home at the Mississippi Museum of Art, Hand to Mouth at Stove Works, and the forthcoming: 2026 Oregon Artist’s Biennial at the Oregon Contemporary. Smith’s writing has been published in exhibition catalogues, academic journals, and periodicals, including Art Papers where he is a contributing editor. He is a past recipient of an Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant and most recently was awarded the Leo and Dorothea Rabkin Prize in art writing. He has been a visiting lecturer at numerous academic and cultural institutions, including Cornell University. Smith is a doctoral candidate in the History of American Civilization program at the University of Delaware, where he is completing his dissertation, entitled “Granite, Power, and Piss: The Transformation of a Confederate Symbol.”
Dr. Gisela Carbonell
Dr. Gisela Carbonell is Curator at the Rollins Museum of Art at Rollins College in Winter Park Florida. Carbonell received her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2009), an M.A. in Art History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (2002), and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras (1997). Prior to joining the RMA, Carbonell was Director of Curatorial Affairs at Artis—Naples, The Baker Museum. She was previously Associate Professor of Art History and Humanities at the University of Puerto Rico at Cayey, and Curatorial Assistant at the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois, where she discovered her passion for museum work in academic settings. With a background in art history and political science, Carbonell is interested in the intersections of art and politics in modern and contemporary art. Carbonell’s recent projects include the serial exhibition What’s New? Recent Acquisitions, which explores the multilayered narratives contained in newly added works to the collection, and The Voice of the People: Freedom of Speech, an exhibition in dialogue with the Rollins College common read theme; an ongoing series of themed tours in Spanish, Arte y café con la curadora; and the development of a collection of works by Puerto Rican artists from the island and the diaspora. Dr. Carbonell is the first Puerto Rican and the first Latina to be in her role at the Rollins Museum of Art.
Mark Tribe
Mark Tribe (born 1966) is an American artist.[1] He is the founder of Rhizome, a not-for-profit arts organization based in New York City.[2] In 2013, he was appointed chair of the MFA program of the School of Visual Arts in New York City.[3] Formerly, he was Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media Studies at Brown University,[4] Director of the Digital Media Center at the Columbia University School of the Arts, and Visiting Assistant Professor and Artist in Residence at Williams College.[5] He is the author of The Port Huron Project: Reenactments of Historic Protest Speeches (Charta, 2010)[6] and the co-author of New Media Art (Taschen, 2006).[7] He received an MFA in Visual Art from the University of California, San Diego in La Jolla, California in 1994 and an BA in Visual Art from Brown University in 1990.[8]
Eric Standley
Eric Standley is a Professor of Studio Art at Virginia Tech. His artworks are drawn in his sketchbook, elaborated on using vector software and a gaming mouse, cut with a laser, and assembled by hand. He is represented by Eli Bronner of the Charles Moffit Gallery of NY; Dinner Gallery of NY; and Media Force of Tokyo, Japan. Eric has exhibited in one hundred and fifty museums and galleries around the world. His artworks are a part of the permanent collections of the Haegeumgang Theme Museum, South Korea, the Palace of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, the Scherenschnittmuseum, Vreden, Germany, and The Zupi Collection of São Paulo, Brazil.
Miranda Kyle
Miranda Kyle (Cherokee descendant/European-American) is the Curator of Indigenous Arts of the Americas at the Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University. She is a scholar on the intersection of Indigenous Land rights, sovereignty, contemporary art, and monuments. She is a sociocultural activist and advocate. She lectures and curates around the importance of preserving and promoting place-based knowledges and culture, public spaces, and
human-informed design. From 2017 to 2024, she served as the Arts & Culture Program Manager and Chief Curator for Atlanta BeltLine, Inc., managing, cultivating, and growing the largest public art exhibition in the American South. In this role, she represented the organization at all levels of government, cultivated partnerships and donors, expanded representation of Black, Indigenous, and Queer artists along the region’s largest infrastructure project and one of the country’s flagship rails to trails projects. She was invited to the 2022 Berlin Biennial at the behest of the Berlin Wall Foundation to present on Monuments and Cultural Memory, in 2021 she was named an Emory University Arts & Social Justice Fellow. That same year, she was also a GA Trend 40 under 40 awardee for her work in preserving artists’ livelihoods during the pandemic. She had received numerous grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Lee Kimche McGrath Fellowship for Arts & Sciences, and was awarded the StarSeed Fellowship to research the intersection of Public Art, Performance, and Space in Riga and Pedvale, Latvia. Kyle has curated exhibitions locally and internationally over the last twelve years, ranging in disciplines from performance to public art. She has served on several boards, including the Americans for the Arts Public Art Network Advisory Council, and the Mid-South Sculpture Alliance, and was a founding member of Public Art Exchange. When not consumed by everything art, she is working with groups like the Beacon Hill Black Alliance for Human Rights, Stone Mountain Action Coalition and Toppled Monuments Archive. Kyle holds an MFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design, and an MA from Edinburgh College of Arts.
Geno Rodriguez
In 1975, Rodriguez co-founded the Alternative Museum, an influential and international locus for artists who were creating art and music, which addressed the pressing socio-political issues of the times. At a time when political art and diversity were not considered issues, The Alternative Museum served as a base for the many artists who were disenfranchised from the American arts scene because of their race, ethnic origins, political ideology, or gender. Due in great measure to Rodriguez’s vision and leadership, acceptance of concepts such as diversity and equality for all Americans in the arts became a reality.
Rodriguez has produced over 300 exhibitions, 400 concerts and panel discussions throughout his career including Dos Mundos: Worlds of the Puerto Ricans at the Huntington Hartford Gallery of Modern Art, in New York City. This was the first contemporary photography exhibition in a major New York City Museum that focused on the lives of Puerto Ricans both in New York City and in Puerto Rico. It was also the first time an American-born curator of Puerto Rican ethnic roots presented an exhibition in a mainstream New York institution.
As the Museum’s director and curator, Rodriguez served on many national, state and city arts panels as well as international cultural conferences. Most notably he served on the Clinton/Gore transition team for the Arts and Humanities in 1992. He was a regular speaker at numerous venues including the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C., and the Association of American Museums Conferences.
Throughout his career, Rodriguez has been a staunch supporter of the disenfranchised artists - many who have received national and international acclaim.
2023 Southern Voices/Global Visions: Southern Curators Summit Highlights
2023 Highlights
South Arts, in partnership with ArtFields, presented the Southern Voices/Global Visions: Southern Curators Summit in Lake City, SC in 2023. The Summit is the first of its kind to be organized by South Arts to bring Southern curators working in visual culture together to begin high-level discussions about the current state of the arts in the South and to begin to craft a new vision for the arts and culture in this region. Summit Sessions focus topics will include confronting identity, preserving culture, technological impacts, and programming in academia.
Want to learn more about the Southern Voices/Global Visions exhibition on display through December 3, 2023, in Lake City, South Carolina? Visit the Southern Voices/Global Visions Website.
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Fill out the registration form to join us for the 2025 Southern Curators Summit
Questions?
If you have any questions about the Southern Curators Summit, please contact: Caitlin Bright at 803.240.5600 or by email below.