Curatorial Practice
Making space for different ways of seeing.
I approach curation as a form of attention: a way of bringing works, ideas, and people into relationship and creating the conditions for something new to become visible.
My curatorial work grows from many of the same questions that shape my work as an artist and educator. How does the way we look affect what we see? What happens when different ways of knowing and making are allowed to coexist? How can an exhibition become not simply a presentation of objects, but a place for encounter, conversation, curiosity, and discovery?
I am particularly interested in creating exhibitions that are intellectually rigorous without becoming exclusive; spaces that welcome the knowledgeable viewer while leaving the door wide open for someone encountering the work or subject for the first time.
The Big Picture: Midwest Large Format Asylum
Chicago Cultural Center, Renaissance Court Gallery
August 4–October 2, 2026
Curated by Hillary Johnson
The Big Picture brings together 76 works by approximately 42 photographers working with large-format cameras and processes.
Rather than organizing the exhibition around a single aesthetic or definition of photography, I wanted to make room for multiplicity. The photographers come from different generations, professions, backgrounds, and relationships to image-making. The work moves between landscape, portraiture, documentary observation, abstraction, constructed imagery, historical processes, and deeply personal ways of looking.
Coexisting on these walls are many ways of encountering and representing the world.
Beyond the Exhibition
Public engagement is an important part of my curatorial practice. I think beyond the exhibition itself to the ways people can enter into its ideas through conversation, demonstration, participation, and shared experience.
The Big Picture is accompanied by an extensive series of free public programs, including artist presentations, demonstrations of photographic processes, participatory events, and film programming.
Curatorial Projects, Collaborations & Inquiries
I welcome conversations with museums, galleries, universities, artist-run spaces, and other organizations interested in exhibitions and public programs built around photography, material practice, attention, place, and interdisciplinary ways of encountering the world.
Have a project or idea in mind? Let’s talk.