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Room 21 at The Barnes Foundation. Photo by Ryan Collerd.

Questions of Practice: Curator Lee Tusman on Curating Performance

Questions of Practice: Curator Lee Tusman on Curating Performance

In conjunction with Room 21, a site-specific musical performance piece created by composer Jace Clayton at the Barnes Foundation, we asked project curator Lee Tusman how he thinks about his role as a curator in the context of performance work. A curator is someone who is “presenting work to the public, and really thinking through the institution, the artwork, or the subject that they’re presenting, the audience, and how [the work is] received,” Tusman says.

Lee Tusman on curating performance. Filmed at the Barnes Foundation on May 31, 2016.

Lee Tusman is an independent curator based in Philadelphia whose projects straddle the intersection of ideas that are socially-based and urban in nature, with a focus on contemporary new media. Tusman has curated dozens of exhibitions and public projects for a diverse group of universities, galleries, institutions, alternative spaces, and public interventions including Toronto’s Vector Fest, Space 1026, the Hidden City Philadelphia Festival, and the artist collective Little Berlin, where he is a curatorial member. Tusman serves as creative director of the nonprofit arts and technology collective, The Hacktory, and as an instructor in the photo and digital arts department at Moore College of Art & Design.