Focus: Curtis Talwst Santiago

Curtis Talwst Santiago (b. 1979, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada) lives and works in Munich. He works in multiple media to examine questions of memory, ancestry, and diasporic imagination. Weaving historical, familial, and speculative narratives together, his works question colonial frameworks and celebrate forgotten forms of knowledge. Santiago has exhibited internationally at venues such as The Drawing Center and The New Museum, New York, NY; The Eli and Edythe Broad Museum at Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI; the Institute of Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA; The Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada; Osage Gallery, Hong Kong, and various others. His works are in the permanent collections of the Lenbachaus in Munich, the National Gallery of Canada, the Kadist Foundation, Studio Museum, Harlem and the Nevada Museum of Art among others. Santiago was included in the SITE Santa Fe SITELines.2018 Biennial, Casa Tomada, the inaugural 2019 Toronto Biennial of Art in Toronto, Canada, and featured in the 2018 and 2022 Biennale de Dakar in Senegal. In 2021, he was an Artist in Residence at Kehinde Wiley's Black Rock Senegal. In 2022 he was a visiting professor and AIR at the University of Tennessee and in 2023 AIR at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and Fountainhead, Miami. He is currently an active board member on the Board of Directors for the Drawing Center in New York, and the 2024 Toronto Biennial.

Photo: Kristin-Lee Moolman.

Currently on view in City Life, a group exhibition curated by Marcus Leslie Singleton: