Adam Carlin is a curator, educator, administrator, farmer, and social practice artist. He is currently the Executive Director of Women of the Shoah, owner of Talkrot gourmet mushroom farm, and co-Director of the artist project, the Greensboro Contemporary Jewish Museum, a decentralized museum that explores the intersections between contemporary art practices and southern Jewish life.

Carlin was previously the Director of Learning & Engagement at the Everson Museum of Art, Director of Community Engagement for UNC Greensboro’s College of Visual and Performing Arts and Director of UNCG’s off-campus contemporary art center Greensboro Project Space. Other notable projects Carlin co-Founded and co-Directed include Creek Colleges, an organization that created schools on the banks of rivers, lakes, and creeks that are going through active restoration and Some Thing Spacious, an experimental project space in Oakland, CA that focused on participatory art practices. He received a BFA from California College of the Arts and an MFA in Art and Social Practice from Portland State University.

Carlin’s practice draws from a variety of histories and lineages. From community organizing principles defined in the civil rights era; to the expanded field of sculpture; to the contemporary canon of socially engaged arts. But first and foremost his practice draws from that which is right in front of him. He makes both permanent and ephemeral projects that are created in context to the external environment, be that a community, a history, a situation, a place, or a person. The projects act as platforms for these constituents to tell their stories, to express their own creativity, and to contribute to a collective idea or action. Some of his personal works often take the form of institutes as artworks which grants artists the power to not only create institutions of their own but to radically reimagine institutional practices in order to counter systemic inequalities that are embedded into the tradition of the arts. Working simultaneously as a curator, educator, administrator, and socially engaged artist, Carlin’s artistic projects have taken the forms of schools, colleges, museums, departments, and various other institutions whose qualities he has co-opted as a container for participatory projects for the public.

CV
acarlin67@gmail.com

Institutes

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