During the month of March 2025, the MAC will present two major public lectures on the theme of contemporary art curation. 

On Tuesday, March 18, the first lecture will be presented by Candice Hopkins, Chief Curator and Executive Director of Forge Project (Taghkanic, New York), at 6 p.m. at Concordia University’s J.A. de Sève Cinema. The event will also highlight the launching of the new Graduate Microprogram and Graduate Certificate in Curatorial Studies at Concordia’s Faculty of Fine Arts, the MAC’s presenting partner for this event.

J.A. de Sève Cinema, Concordia University
LB-125 – 1400 De Maisonneuve Boulevard West, Montreal
In English

On Tuesday, March 25, the second lecture will be given by Meg Onli, Nancy and Fred Poses Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. This event is organized in collaboration with Ara Osterweil and the Department of English and the Department of Art History and Communications Studies at McGill University,and will be held at 7 p.m. in the Moot Court at McGill’s Faculty of Law.

Moot Court, McGill University
Chancellor Day Hall, 3644 Peel Street, Montreal
In English

The speakers will share their experiences and viewpoints on the present-day challenges and possibilities of curatorial practice, offering a unique opportunity to explore the current dynamics of the art world and its institutions.

These lectures are part of a series of initiatives and reflections led by the MAC’s curatorial team in view of the MAC’s reopening on Sainte-Catherine Street, following its major renovation project.

Meg Onli is the Nancy and Fred Poses Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Onli has served as the Andrea B. Laporte Associate Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and, most recently, as Co-Director and Curator of the Underground Museum in Los Angeles. She has curated such exhibitions as Speech/Acts (2017), Colored People Time: Mundane Features, Quotidian Pasts, Banal Presents (2019), and, with Erin Christovale, the retrospective Ulysses Jenkins: Without Your Interpretation (2021). Onli was appointed to curate the 2024 Whitney Biennial alongside Chrissie Iles. Currently, she is working with artist Alex Da Corte on an exhibition of the work of Roy Lichtenstein.

Candice Hopkins is a citizen of  Carcross/Tagish First Nation and lives in Milan, New York. In her writing and curatorial practice, she explores the intersections of history, contemporary art, and Indigeneity. She is executive director and chief curator of Forge Project, Taghkanic, NY. She has curated the exhibitions Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination Since 1969, at the Hessel Museum; Impossible Music, co-curated with Raven Chacon and Stavia Grimani, at the Miller ICA; and the touring exhibitions Soundings; An Exhibition in Five Parts, co-curated with Dylan Robinson, and ᑕᑯᒃᓴᐅᔪᒻᒪᕆᒃ, Double Vision, featuring textiles, prints, and drawings by Jessie Oonark, Janet Kigusiuq, and Victoria Mamnguqsualuk. She was the senior curator for the inaugural 2019 and 2022 editions of the Toronto Biennial of Art and part of the curatorial team for the Canadian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, featuring the work of the media collective Isuma; documenta 14, Athens and Kassel; and Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Her notable essays include “The Gilded Gaze: Wealth and Economies on the Colonial Frontier,” in the documenta 14 Reader; “Outlawed Social Life,” in South as a State of Mind; and “The Appropriation Debates (or The Gallows of History),” in Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value (New Museum/MIT Press, 2020).