James Voorhies is a curator, art historian and educator who holds a Ph.D. in modern and contemporary art history. He currently serves as Harvard University's Director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. http://www.ves.fas.harvard.edu/voorhies.html
Voorhies was founder and director of Bureau for Open Culture, a nomadic institution combining exhibitions, education, design and publishing to explore new platforms for experiencing and producing art. ( www.bureauforopenculture.org ) He has curated exhibitions and programs of international contemporary art and film at MASS MoCA, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus College of Art & Design and Bennington College. He has produced commissions with artists including Claire Fontaine, Thomas Hirschhorn, Learning Site, Mary Lum, Dennis McNulty, Red76, REINIGUNGSGESELLSCHAFT and Christian Tomaszewski.
Voorhies has taught art history and lectured at San Francisco Art Institute, Parsons The New School for Design, Tyler School of Art and Carnegie Mellon University. Previously, he served as Director of Exhibitions at Columbus College of Art & Design, Deputy Director at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, and worked in curatorial departments at Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is visiting faculty in Visual Arts at Bennington College in Vermont.
His doctoral dissertation Falling from the Grip of Grace: The Exhibition as a Critical Form since 1968 (2012) is a historical and theoretical account of exhibitions from 1968 to the present with particular attention to the changing role of the spectator. It critically analyzes connections between late-Modernist artistic strategies engaged with the exhibition as a critical form to the subsequent dispersal of those strategies into contemporary curatorial and artistic practices.
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