Alpesh Kantilal Patel is an art historian, curator, and critic whose work develops queer and transcultural approaches to contemporary art and the writing of art history. Across scholarship, criticism, editing, and exhibition-making, their work asks how histories might be narrated relationally rather than through singular origins, bounded geographies, or linear accounts of influence. These forms constitute an interconnected research practice: questions first explored through artworks, exhibitions, criticism, or collaborative projects frequently migrate into longer-form scholarship, while books generate new curatorial and editorial inquiries.

Patel is the author of Multiple and One: Writing Queer Global Art Histories (Manchester University Press, 2027), recipient of a 2026 Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant, and Productive Failure: Writing Queer Transnational South Asian Art Histories (Manchester University Press, 2017). Across these books, they develop relational and deliberately non-linear approaches to art history attentive to diaspora, movement, difference, and connections among geographically dispersed places. Multiple and One extends this thinking through what Patel calls an archipelagic feeling: an attention to passages, breaks, proximities, and relations that allows multiple histories to remain connected without becoming the same.

Collaborative and editorial work is equally central to Patel’s practice. They co-edited Storytellers of Art Histories (Intellect, 2022) with Yasmeen Siddiqui and have co-edited special issues and dossiers for Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, ASAP/J, and Art Journal with scholars including Chika Okeke-Agulu, Jane Chin Davidson, Rachael Grew, and Marsha Meskimmon. Patel is also the editor of Creole Archive: Jacek J. Kolasiński (Intellect), a major collaborative volume that has completed external peer review and is moving toward press. Projected at approximately 550 pages and featuring more than 300 full-color images, the book brings together six peer-reviewed essays by scholars working across several fields with contributions by artists, scholars, and community members, including a substantial contingent of contributors of Haitian descent and participants rooted in South Florida’s Haitian and artistic communities. Centered on an archive connecting Poland, Haiti, the Caribbean, and Miami, the project extends Patel’s interest in scholarship as a collective and transregional form of knowledge-making.

Patel’s curatorial practice has similarly served as a site of research. Their exhibitions have ranged from Mixing It Up: Queering Curry Mile and Currying Canal Street in Manchester, England, to projects in Miami, at Franconia Sculpture Park, and at UrbanGlass in Brooklyn, where they served as Curator-at-Large and organized the Forever Becoming series on materiality, decolonization, and trans* subjectivity. Ideas developed through these projects have subsequently entered their books and other scholarship, making exhibition-making not an adjunct to writing but one of the places from which it emerges.

Patel has also sustained an extensive practice as a critic, publishing reviews, interviews, and essays in venues including Artforum, Art in America, frieze, Hyperallergic, BOMB, and The Brooklyn Rail. Their criticism has engaged contemporary art across a notably wide geography—from New Delhi, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Riga, and Warsaw to Miami, New York, and Philadelphia—and has frequently provided an early testing ground for questions that later develop through curating and scholarship.

The international scope of Patel’s work is reflected not only in its subjects and sites but also in the recognition it has received. Their research and curatorial practice have been supported by Fulbright awards in Poland, the Paul Mellon Centre in England, the Danish Arts Foundation, Erasmus+ in Latvia, Arts Council England, the Institute of Advanced Studies at Loughborough University, and the Corning Museum of Glass.

Patel’s current research project, Glassy, carries this interconnected practice into questions of materiality. Moving between glass as a material and “glassy” as a condition, it asks what attention to matter, fabrication, opacity, translucency, pressure, and transformation can contribute to queer, trans, and decolonial approaches to contemporary art. Patel is associate professor of global contemporary art at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University.