The Curatorial Roundtable: Prem Krishnamurthy

October 4, 2023

MA Curatorial Practice presents a talk with designer, author, curator and educator Prem Krishnamurthy. Krishnamurthy’s multifaceted work explores the role of art as an agent of transformation at an individual, collective and structural level. This manifests itself in books, exhibitions, images, performances, publications, systems, talks, texts and workshops. He received the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Communications Design in 2015 and KW Institute for Contemporary Art’s “A Year With…” residency fellowship in 2018. From 2017–2021, Krishnamurthy’s experimental electronic book P!DF was published by O-R-G. In 2022, Domain Books published his book-length epistolary essay, On Letters. Krishnamurthy currently directs Wkshps, a multidisciplinary design studio, and organizes Department of Transformation, an itinerant workshop that practices collaborative tools for social change.

In addition to leading projects with artists, cultural institutions and nonprofit organizations across the world, Krishnamurthy has curated several large-scale exhibitions. These include “Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows,” the 2022 edition of FRONT International, Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art; “Our Silver City, 2094,” Nottingham Contemporary; and Ministry of Graphic Design, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. Previously, Krishnamurthy founded the design studio Project Projects and the exhibition space P! in New York.

The Curatorial Roundtable, an international forum for curators and institutional leaders to discuss formative and current projects, is hosted by Steven Henry Madoff, head of the MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.