Anuradha Vikram
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Anuradha Vikram is an art critic, curator, author, and lecturer based in Los Angeles, California. She is the artistic director of 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, and a senior lecturer at Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles.[1] She has contributed to numerous publications, and has a published book called Decolonizing Culture: Essays on the Intersection of Art and Politics.
Growing up in Westchester County, New York, Anuradha Vikram began being involved in making art during high school.[2] In 1997 she completed a B.S. Studio Art, minor in Art History, at New York University.[3] She went on in 1999 until 2002, to manage the studios for artists Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen.[4] She moved to California, working at Nikolas Weinstein's glass studio in the San Francisco Bay Area.[2] She went to graduate school, completing an M.A. in Curatorial Practice at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco in 2005.[5] Vikram has worked at the Richmond Art Center in Richmond, California, as well as the UC Berkeley Art Department.
Career
In 2012, she curated Spaces of Life: The Art of Sonya Rapoport which focused on Rapoport's interactive work from 1979-2011 at Mills College Art Museum.[6] Later in 2013 Vikram curated Social Fabric at the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles.[7] She also curated the show Uncommon Terrain for Shulamit Nazarian Gallery in 2015.[8] She has organized over fifty exhibitions over the last decade.[9]
In 2017, she published her first book Decolonizing Culture with Art Practical and Sming Sming Books.[10] Decolonizing Culture book focuses on the intersection of art and politics in contemporary art.[11]
Vikram actively contributes to critical art magazines, such as Hyperallergic, Art Practical and the San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) blog.[3][12]
Notable concepts
A notable concept of Vikram's curatorial practice is creating connections between people. She works to extend beyond artwork that is solely in dialogue with European/American standards of what art is.[2] Her work concerns ideas of gender, representation, cultural appropriation, diversity, race, and culture.[13] She aims to find the intersection between the contemporary art world and politics, writing to acknowledge the imbalance in treatment in the art world between artists of color and white artists. Through her work, Vikram shows that while contemporary art has been a space for strong social justice outlooks,[14] it does not quite get to a non-imperialist approach to curating work. In interviews she has spoken about sexism in art through a discussion of Carolee Schneeman.[2] She has also spoken about racial disparity in the contemporary art world through a discussion of Isaac Julien.[9]
