Alpesh Kantilal Patel (he/they) is an associate professor of global contemporary art at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University. His art-historical scholarship, art criticism, curatorial projects, and teaching reflect his queer, anti-racist, and transcultural approach to contemporary art. He is an associate editor of visual arts, architecture, and art history for the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present/Journal, and an editorial advisory committee member of the Getty Research Journal. Previously, he was Chair of the Editorial Board of Art Journal and Art Journal Open (AJO) and an editor of contemporary art book reviews for caa.reviews.
He is the author of the books Multiple and one: writing queer global art histories (forthcoming, 2027) and Productive failure: writing queer transnational South Asian art histories (2017) and editor of the anthologies Creole Archive: Jacek J. Kolasiński (forthcoming, 2027) and Storytellers of Art Histories (2022). He is editor of five exhibition catalogues, published in conjunction with the eponymous exhibitions he organized for Miami Beach Urban Studios (MBUS)-Florida International University (FIU), mounir fatmi: Modern Times (2015), Concrete Feet: Tom Scicluna (2015), This Too Shall Pass: New Work by Saravanan Parasuraman (2014), Cause Way: Paul Donald (2013), and Transformation (2011); and co-editor of two special journal issues, “What Can Trans Do?,” Art Journal (forthcoming, 2026), and “Okwui Enwezor and the Art of Curating,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art (2021), as well as the dossier “TRANS-ASIA,” ASAP/J (2024).
As curator at large at UrbanGlass in New York City, he organized a series of exhibitions in 2023-2024 under the theme “Forever Becoming: Decolonization, Materiality, and Trans* Subjectivity.” Other shows he has organized include the British Arts Council–funded “Mixing It Up: Queering Curry Mile and Currying Canal Street” (2007), which took place across seven venues in Manchester, England, over a month. He spearheaded successful efforts for MBUS-FIU to be designated as a “City of Miami Beach Cultural Anchor” in 2012 and, as a result, be eligible for annual cultural arts grants to support a range of programming, including a queer voices and social justice artist lecture series he organized. In addition, from 2017 to 2019, he served as chair of the Art in Public Spaces Committee of Miami Beach.
His essays have appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as e-misférica, Art History Pedagogy & Practice, and philoSOPHIA: A Journal of transContinental Feminism and exhibition catalogs, including The World That Belongs to Us (New Art Gallery Walsall, England, 2023), Queer Communion: Ron Athey and the Extreme Body (Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2020), and Lam Tung Pang: Saan Dung Ghei (Blindspot Gallery, Hong Kong, 2020). He has book chapters in The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History (2023), A Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework (2023), Globalizing East European Art Histories: Past and Present (2018), Queer Asian American Art Histories (2017), and Creolising Europe: Legacies and Transformations (2015), among others.
Over 70 short-form exhibition reviews, book reviews, and interviews he has conducted with artists have been published in art publications such as Artforum, artforum.com, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB magazine, Hyperallergic, and frieze; and academic journals such as Art History (Association for Art History), South Asian Popular Culture, Synoptique: An Online Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies, Journal of Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, Journal of Curatorial Studies, and GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.
For a decade before his appointment at Tyler, he was based at FIU from 2011 to 2021, where he directed the MFA program in Visual Arts. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, he worked in the curatorial departments and directors’ offices of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, both in New York City. He received a bachelor’s degree in art history with distinction from Yale University and his doctorate in art history and visual studies from the University of Manchester, England.