Alpesh Kantilal Patel’s (they/he) art historical scholarship, curation, and criticism reflect their queer, anti-racist, and transnational approach to contemporary art. They are an associate professor of global contemporary art at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University. Recently, they were an Artist in Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts and curator at large at UrbanGlass, Brooklyn, where they organized a series of exhibitions under the theme, “Forever Becoming: Decolonization, Materiality, and Trans* Subjectivity.” Previously Chair of the Editorial Board of Art Journal and Art Journal Open (AJO) and an editor of contemporary art book reviews for caa.reviews, they are associate editor of visual arts, architecture, and art history for the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present)/Journal and editorial advisory committee member of the Getty Research Journal.
Their first monograph, Productive Failure: Writing Queer Transnational South Asian Art Histories (2017), mobilizes “affirmative criticality" and "productive failure" as conceptual frameworks to produce a more ethical, entangled, and transparent practice of writing (art) history. They are working on a new monograph, Multiple and One: Writing Global Queer Art Histories (under contract with Manchester University Press).
They are co-editor with Chika Okeke-Aglu and Jane Chin Davidson of a special issue of the journal Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art (2021) commemorating Okwui Enwezor (1963–2019) and co-editor with Yasmeen Siddiqui of the anthology Storytellers of Art Histories (April 2022, Intellect), which brings together first-person narratives of an intergenerational group of art historians, curators, artists, and archivists, who are shaping how contemporary art history is written. They are also the editor of Modern Times: mounir fatmi (2016), Concrete Feet: Tom Scicluna (2016), Cause Way: Paul Donald (2016), and This Too Shall Pass: New Work by Saravanan Parasuraman (2014), published in conjunction with the eponymous exhibitions they organized for Miami Beach Urban Studios (MBUS)-Florida International University (FIU).
They have published book chapters in numerous anthologies, such as The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History; A Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework; Globalizing East European Art Histories: Past and Present; Cosmopolitics and Biopolitics: Ethics and Aesthetics in Contemporary Art; Queering Contemporary Asian American Art; Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories; From Museum Critique to the Critical Museum: Theory and Practice; and Creolising Europe: Legacies and Transformations. In addition, they have published peer-reviewed articles in Art History Pedagogy and Practice, Arts, darkmatter Journal: In the Ruins of Imperial Culture, and e-misférica: The Journal of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics (New York University), among others.
A frequent contributor of exhibition reviews to international art magazines such as frieze, Hyperallergic.com, Artforum, and Art in America, they have organized exhibitions in the United States and abroad. In 2007, they produced public artworks, performances, and educational workshops as part of the exhibition Mixing It Up: Queering Curry Mile and Currying Canal Street, which took place at Contact Theatre, Cornerhouse Art Gallery, Urbis: Museum of the City, The Whitworth Art Gallery, The Manchester Museum, and other public sites in Manchester, England.
They spearheaded successful efforts for MBUS-FIU to be designated as a “City of Miami Beach Cultural Anchor” in 2012 and, therefore, eligible for yearly cultural arts grants to support a range of programming, such as a social justice artist lecture series they organized, among others. In addition, from 2017 through 2019, they were chair of the Art in Public Spaces Committee of Miami Beach.
They have received fellowships from the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS), Loughborough University, England, and Cranbrook Academy of Art and visiting scholar appointments at New York University’s Center for Gender and Sexuality and Asian/Pacific/American Institute. A Fulbright Scholar at Adam Mickiewicz University and the University of Fine Arts, both in Poznań, Poland, their research has also received support from the National Endowment of Humanities, Arts Council England, Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, Danish Arts Foundation, Manchester City Council, and European Union Erasmus+ Program, among others.
For a decade before their appointment at Tyler, they were a tenured associate professor of contemporary art at FIU, where they directed the MFA program in Visual Arts from 2012 through 2017. Before coming to FIU in the fall of 2011, they worked in the curatorial departments and director’s offices of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, both in New York City.
They received a bachelor’s from Yale University and their doctorate from the University of Manchester.