Senior Curatorial and AssociatePrograms

The Facilitator

Success in curation occurs when someone walks into an exhibition and comes out seeing an aspect of life through a different lens. This process of evolution can come from the artwork or the captions introducing them. Still, audiences can often benefit from being pulled closer to the exhibition. SJMA’s curatorial and programs associate, Nidhi Gandhi, describes her work as “ideating and building exhibitions and facilitating programs that work directly with artists on workshops, conversations, or performance pieces. Different modalities of interaction help people learn.” While educational programming is not new to SJMA, thinking strategically and holistically about conversations that connect the museum’s collection to the community has become a point of emphasis.

Nidhi recalls, “When I was younger, I really wanted to understand how the brain worked, and I had always been fascinated by art. While pursuing my bachelor’s in neuroscience, I focused on child development. I started volunteering at a local museum, facilitating educational programs.” Her first curatorial project in college was on neuroaesthetics, which explored humans’ perception of abstraction in art. These experiences align with art institutions moving away from the purity of art history that lives in a cultural vacuum composed of white walls that display artworks representative of the artistic canon and toward examining and interpreting art through specific lenses.

Nidhi approaches her work with a sense of openness that she learned from experimentation and the scientific method that allows her to be a caretaker of art and to translate it in a way the community can access. She elaborates, “Most of what we call science is actually a lot of unknowns. In curation, we always start with the artist and the art, which usually leads you to a story to tell. Outdated ideas of art museums as white towers should be torn down for our community.” Nidhi’s drive begins with art but is fueled by her experience growing up in the South Bay and her connection to the real experiences of people living in the community. C