In recent years, the museum and gallery have increasingly become self-reflexive spaces, in which the relationship between art, its display, its creators, and its audience is subverted and democratized. One effect of this has been a growing place for artists as curators, and in The Artist as Curator Celina Jeffery brings together a group of scholars and artists to explore the many ways that artists have introduced new curatorial ways of thinking and talking about artistic culture. Taking a deliberately multidisciplinary and cross-cultural focus, The Artist as Curator will fill a gap in museum and curatorial studies, offering a thorough and diverse treatment of various approaches to the historical and changing role of the artist as curator that should appeal to scholars, curators, and artists alike.

Heid E. Erdrich writes from the present into the future where human anxiety lives. Many of her poems engage ekphrasis around the visual work of contemporary artists who, like Erdrich, are Anishinaabe. Poems in this collection also curate unmountable exhibits in not-yet-existent museums devoted to the ephemera of communication and technology. A central trope is the mixtape, an ephemeral form that Erdrich explores in its role of carrying the romantic angst of American couples. These poems recognize how our love of technology and how the extraction industries on indigenous lands that technology requires threaten our future and obscure the realities of indigenous peoples who know what it is to survive apocalypse. Deeply eco-poetic poems extend beyond the page in poemeos, collaboratively made poem films accessible in the text through the new but already archaic use of QR codes. Collaborative poems highlighting lessons in Anishinaabemowin also broaden the context of Erdrich’s work. Despite how little communications technology has helped to bring people toward understanding one another, these poems speak to the keen human yearning to connect as they urge engagement of the image, the moment, the sensual, and the real.