Candice Hopkins


Candice Hopkins is a curator, writer, and researcher who predominantly explores areas of history, art, and indigeneity, and their intersections. Hopkins is co-curator of the 2018 SITE Santa Fe biennial, Casa tomada and recently named senior curator for the 2019 Toronto Biennial of Art and on the curatorial team of the Canadian Pavilion of the 58th Venice Biennale, featuring the work of the media art collective Isuma. She was a curator for documenta 14. She has held curatorial positions at prestigious institutions including the Walter Phillips Gallery, Western Front Society, the National Gallery of Canada, and The Institute of American Indian Arts Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Writing

Her recent essays include "The Appropriation Debates" for Mousse magazine, "Outlawed Social Life", on the ban of the potlatch ceremony and the work of the late artist Beau Dick for the documenta 14 edited issue of South as a State of Mind as well as the chapter "The Gilded Gaze: Wealth and Economies on the Colonial Frontier," in the documenta 14 Reader. In 2014 her chapter "If History Moves at the Speed of its Weapons" on the work of the artist collective Postcommodity and the Pueblo Revolt was published in the book Coded Territories: Tracing Indigenous Pathways in New Media Art by University of Calgary Press.
In September, 2016 Hopkins quickly responded to the untimely death of artist Annie Pootoogook in the article "An Elegy for Annie Pootoogook ", featured in the online art criticism publication Momus. For the conclusion of the article Hopkins draws similarities between Pootoogook's generous character and her unbridled genius and Sedna, an Arctic folkloric character who met an untimely death by drowning, and through death evolved to become the mother of the sea.
For the 13th edition of Fillip released in the Spring 2011, Hopkins authored a text titled "The Golden Potlatch: Study in Mimesis and Capitalist Desire". In this text Hopkins introduces the interconnectedness between Indigenous lands, prospectors interests and monetary desires catalyzed by the Klondike Gold Rush.
Other writings and articles include "Fair Trade Heads: A Conversation on Repatriation and Indigenous Peoples with Maria Thereza Alves and Jolene Rickard" for South As a State of Mind; "Inventory" for C Magazine on sound, harmonics and indigenous pedagogies; "Native North America," a conversation with Richard William Hill for Mousse Magazine, and, also in Mousse, an interview with artist and architect Joar Nango, "Temporary Structures and Architecture on the Move."
She is co-editor with Marisa Morán Jahn and Berin Golonu of the book Recipes for an Encounter, published in 2009 by the Western Front.

Notable curatorial projects