Jenifer Papararo at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver. Papararo has just been appointed director, programs at Plug In ICA in Winnipeg.
Jenifer Papararo, currently curator at Vancouver’s Contemporary Art Gallery, has been appointed director, programs at Winnipeg’s Plug In ICA. She will begin there on November 17.
She joins Sheila Spence—named last week as director, administration and development at Plug In—since the gallery’s board recently restructured lead staffing into two director positions.
Papararo has 15 years of experience within the field of contemporary art as a curator, writer, institutional director and member of a service oriented curatorial and artist collective. At the CAG, she has worked with artists including Mike Nelson, Frances Stark, Jeff Wall and Rodney Graham. Prior to her current post, as director of programming and publishing at Mercer Union in Toronto, she curated Mark Leckey’s Soundsystem. And as a member of the collective Instant Coffee, she has exhibited at Vancouver Art Gallery, the Toronto Sculpture Garden, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and other national and international locales.
In a release, Papararo said, “Working collaboratively is imperative to my curatorial philosophy, which seems fitting to Plug In’s history and drive to mess with normative structures of hierarchy and authorship. It is within this somewhat rebellious drive that I insert myself with the hopes of criss-crossing local, national and global lines to support artists, build audiences and draw sustained relations with both.”
In the same release, Plug In board chair Noam Gonick stated that Papararo’s “participation and contribution to the living culture around her and her parallel praxis as a member of the Instant Coffee artists’ collective resonate with Plug In’s yearning to stretch and reignite the Institute of Contemporary Art concept, both for Winnipeg and beyond.”
