Alpesh Kantilal Patel is an art historian, curator, critic, and editor whose work develops queer and transcultural approaches to contemporary art and the writing of art history.
Patel is the author of Multiple and One: Writing Queer Global Art Histories (Manchester University Press, 2027), recipient of a 2026 College Art Association/Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant. The book asks how queer and trans approaches might reshape the writing of global art histories. Drawing on Édouard Glissant’s thinking on creolization and bringing it into conversation with queer and trans theory, Patel stages relations among artistic practices across South Florida, eastern Europe, Asia, and the Americas that might otherwise remain contained within national or regional frameworks. Organized around concepts including opacity, roots/routes, errantry, Tout-monde, and the archipelago, Multiple and One combines close engagement with artworks with autotheory, curatorial knowledge-making, and what Patel describes as vulnerable reading. Rather than aspiring to comprehensive global coverage, the book experiments with ways of writing art history that allow unexpected relations, intimacies, and sexual geographies to emerge across different places and times.
Patel’s earlier monograph, Productive Failure: Writing Queer Transnational South Asian Art Histories (Manchester University Press, 2017), examines how queer theory might unsettle conventional approaches to transnational and South Asian art histories. Their editorial projects include Storytellers of Art Histories (Intellect, 2022), coedited with Yasmeen Siddiqui; “Okwui Enwezor and the Art of Curating” for Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, coedited with Chika Okeke-Agulu and Jane Chin Davidson; “TRANS-ASIA” for ASAP/J, with Davidson; and “What Can Trans Do? Trans Terms for Eco-criticism and Decoloniality in Art’s Histories” for Art Journal, with Davidson, Rachael Grew, and Marsha Meskimmon.
Patel’s curatorial practice has similarly served as a site of research. Their projects have included Mixing It Up: Queering Curry Mile and Currying Canal Street in Manchester; exhibitions and public programs in Miami; a project at Franconia Sculpture Park; and Forever Becoming: Decolonization, Materiality, and Trans Subjectivity*, a project platform at UrbanGlass in Brooklyn. Their criticism and interviews have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, frieze, Hyperallergic, BOMB, and The Brooklyn Rail.
Patel is also the editor of Creole Archive: Jacek J. Kolasiński (Intellect), a collaborative volume of approximately 500 pages and more than 300 color images that has completed external peer review and is under contract. Their current major research project extends this interconnected practice into questions of materiality, craft, making, opacity, translucency, and material transformation in queer, trans, and decolonial contemporary art.
Patel is Associate Professor of Global Contemporary Art at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University. Their research and curatorial work has been supported by the Fulbright Program, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Danish Arts Foundation, Erasmus+ Program, Arts Council England, Loughborough University Institute of Advanced Studies, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Corning Museum of Glass, among others.