Alpesh Kantilal Patel is an art historian and curator whose work develops a queer, transcultural approach to contemporary art that rethinks how art history is written. Their scholarship focuses on relational, non-linear, and multi-sited forms of narration—what Patel calls "they-stories," narrative forms that resist singular authorship and linear coherence in favor of plural, relational modes of telling across dispersed contexts. Across books, essays, and exhibitions, this work develops an archipelagic feeling: a mode of relation that moves through passages, breaks, and constellations rather than fixed geographies.
Patel is an associate professor of global contemporary art at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University. They are co-editor of the “Re-thinking Art's Histories” book series for Manchester University Press, associate editor of visual arts, architecture, and art history for ASAP/J, and a member of the editorial advisory committee of the Getty Research Journal. They previously chaired the Editorial Board of Art Journal and Art Journal Open, and edited contemporary art book reviews for caa.reviews.
They are the author of Multiple and One: Writing Queer Global Art Histories (forthcoming, January 2027; recipient of the 2026 Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant) and Productive Failure: Writing Queer Transnational South Asian Art Histories (2017), and editor of the anthology Storytellers of Art Histories (2022), along with several co-edited special journal issues, including "What Can Trans Do?" (Art Journal, forthcoming 2026) and the dossier "TRANS-ASIA" (ASAP/J, 2024).
As curator-at-large at UrbanGlass, Patel organized the 2023–2024 exhibition series "Forever Becoming: Decolonization, Materiality, and Trans* Subjectivity." Earlier curatorial projects include the British Arts Council–funded "Mixing It Up: Queering Curry Mile and Currying Canal Street" (Manchester, 2007) and five exhibition catalogues produced during their tenure at Miami Beach Urban Studios (MBUS), Florida International University, where they also secured the city's "Cultural Anchor" designation in 2012 and later chaired Miami Beach's Art in Public Spaces Committee (2017–2019).
Patel's essays and reviews have appeared in venues including Artforum, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, frieze, Art History, and GLQ, and their book chapters appear in volumes such as The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History (2023) and A Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework (2023). A full list of publications, exhibitions, and lectures is available on their CV.
Before joining Temple in 2021, Patel spent a decade at Florida International University, where they directed the MFA program in Visual Arts. Earlier, they worked in the curatorial departments and directors' offices of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the New Museum. They hold a BA in art history with distinction from Yale University and a PhD in art history and visual studies from the University of Manchester.