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, examining how diasporic, queer, and decolonial practices generate knowledge through storytelling and curatorial practice, including what Patel describes as “they-stories”—narrative forms that resist singular authorship and linear coherence, foregrounding plural, relational modes of telling across dispersed contexts.
Patel is an associate professor of global contemporary art at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University. Their scholarship, criticism, curatorial projects, and teaching reflect a queer, anti-racist, and transcultural approach to contemporary art. Across books, essays, and exhibitions, their work develops an archipelagic feeling—a mode of relation that moves through passages, breaks, and constellations rather than fixed geographies or linear narratives. They are co-editor of the Re-thinking Art’s Histories book series for Manchester University Press, an 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. Previously, they served as Chair of the Editorial Board of Art Journal and Art Journal Open (AJO) and as editor of contemporary art book reviews for caa.reviews.
They are 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). They are co-editor of three special journal issues/sections: “What Can Trans Do?,” Art Journal (forthcoming, 2026); “Okwui Enwezor and the Art of Curating,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art (2021); and the dossier “TRANS-ASIA,” ASAP/J (2024). Patel has also edited five exhibition catalogues published in conjunction with exhibitions they organized for Miami Beach Urban Studios (MBUS), Florida International University, including 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).
As curator-at-large at UrbanGlass, Patel organized a series of exhibitions in 2023–2024 under the theme “Forever Becoming: Decolonization, Materiality, and Trans* Subjectivity.” Other exhibitions 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. At MBUS-FIU, they spearheaded successful efforts to secure designation as a “City of Miami Beach Cultural Anchor” in 2012, enabling sustained funding for public programming, including a queer voices and social justice artist lecture series they organized. From 2017 to 2019, they also served as chair of the Art in Public Spaces Committee of Miami Beach.
Patel’s essays have appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as e-misférica, Art History Pedagogy & Practice, and philoSOPHIA: A Journal of transContinental Feminism, as well as in exhibition catalogs including The World That Belongs to Us (New Art Gallery Walsall, 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). Their book chapters appear in volumes such as 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.
They have published over eighty short-form exhibition reviews, book reviews, and artist interviews in venues including Artforum, Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, Hyperallergic, and frieze, as well as academic journals such as Art History, South Asian Popular Culture, Synoptique, Journal of Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, Journal of Curatorial Studies, and GLQ.
Before joining Temple University, Patel was based at Florida International University from 2011 to 2021, where they directed the MFA program in Visual Arts. Earlier in their career, they worked in the curatorial departments and directors’ offices of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the New Museum. They received a bachelor’s degree in art history with distinction from Yale University and a doctorate in art history and visual studies from the University of Manchester.