Lydia Matthews

If you start to understand the goal of curating to be about generating dialogue, or new sorts of social relations, or unusual forms of knowledge exchange–then that becomes the project’s focus and guides all curatorial decisions. The objects/images you choose to include may be aesthetically charged and of interest to an art-oriented crowd, but the ways that you curatorially activate those objects through co-creation or orchestrated dialogical exchanges has the potential of attracting much broader publics who want to engage with the issues that the art works raise.

Lydia Matthews is Professor of Visual Culture at Parsons and the Founding Director of the Curatorial Design Research Lab. A curator, writer, educator and cultural activist, she trained as a modern and contemporary art historian at UC Berkeley and London’s Courtauld Institute. Her work explores how today’s artists, artisans and designers foster critical democratic debates and intimate community interactions in the public sphere, often in response to a variety of urgent global and local conditions in their daily lives. Her essays have appeared in numerous journals and exhibition catalogs, and she has lectured internationally on socially-engaged art, craft and design practices. Commissioned by Fulbright, Open Society Foundation, Trust for Mutual Understanding, CEC Artslink, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Emre Senan Foundation and the US Embassy in the Republic of Georgia, her participatory curatorial projects in New York, the Post-Soviet region, Turkey and Southern Europe include exhibitions, community-based urban festivals, and multidisciplinary pedagogical exchanges addressing ecological and social sustainability. She is online at: www.lydiamatthews.com

SELECTED PROJECTS

Rubble Riches Treasure Trash, 2014. "Rubble Riches Treasure Trash" features U.S.A.-based artists and designers who aim to research, critique, and ultimately minimize the seductive appeal and detrimental impact of contemporary consumer culture. At times serious, playful, poetic and pragmatic, their projects demonstrate how it is possible to take a more imaginative and active role in addressing local environmental problems that plague our daily lives.
Thirst, 2014. "Thirst," a project co-curated by Lydia Matthews + Current Collective and Hope Ginsburg + Sponge HQ, explored our physical needs and psychological desires for water. The project opened on World Water Day (March 22nd, 2014), transforming Proteus Gowanus' space in Brooklyn into a living laboratory where a series of events and hands-on workshops took place as a form of researching thirsty materials, plants, animals and people.
Batumi Backyard Stories, 2013. The “Batumi Backyard Stories II” is a grassroots cultural initiative that brings together local artists and citizens to explore and co-create the hidden histories that exist within any given neighborhood in the city of Batumi, Georgia.
Broken But Not Defeated: Repair as Design Methodology and Social Practice, 2012. We live in an age that increasingly emphasizes recycling as a sustainable solution to the global ecological crisis rather than encouraging individuals or local communities to invest time and effort into repairing damaged goods. This willingness to embrace, amplify or transform used or broken goods has become a popular mode within design, art and craft practices today. Whereas “recycling” takes objects and reduces them into a more compressed material state, “upcycling” adds value to discarded goods by re-imagining new forms or functions for them. Thus, the act of repair (vs. recycling) can actually produce new kinds of cultural meaning, both for objects and their makers.
Yahsibey Make-Overs: Play, Repair and Co-Design, 2013. This 15 day co-design workshop invites 10 international design/art students to live, work, cook, design, debate and play together at Emre Senan Design Foundation (ESDF) in Yahsibey, a small mountain village overlooking the Aegean Sea in the Izmir region of Turkey. We will try to catalyze new forms of collaborative exchange between our ESDF design community and the residents of Yahsibey and Bademler villages by collecting and archiving broken objects--from children’s toys to second-hand furniture to moth-eaten jackets.
Against All Odds (AAO) Project: Ethics/Aesthetics was an interdisciplinary collaboration between international universities including Parsons The New School for Design, the non-profit organization Life Strategies and the Benaki Museum in Athens, Greece. Its curatorial platform explored ways that architects, artists and designers are devising innovative aesthetic strategies to tackle ecological, social and economic crises within their local environments.