Executive Director & Chief Curator, Forge Project

Candice Hopkins is a citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation and lives in Red Hook, New York. Her writing and curatorial practice explore the intersections of history, contemporary art, and Indigeneity. She is Executive Director & Chief Curator of Forge Project, a Native-led organization whose mandate is to cultivate and advance Indigenous leadership in arts and culture, and Fellow in Indigenous Art History and Curatorial Studies, Bard College. She is curator of the exhibitions Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination Since 1969 at the Hessel Museum of Art; Impossible Music, co-curated with Raven Chacon and Stavia Grimani at the Miller ICA, and the touring exhibitions, Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts, co-curated with Dylan Robinson, and ᑕᑯᒃᓴᐅᔪᒻᒪᕆᒃ Double Vision, featuring textiles, prints and drawings by Jessie Oonark, Janet Kigusiuq, and Victoria Mamnguqsualuk. She was the Senior Curator for the inaugural 2019 and 2022 editions of the Toronto Biennial of Art and part of the curatorial team for the Canadian Pavilion at the fifty-eighth Venice Biennale, featuring the work of the media collective Isuma; documenta 14 ,Athens and Kassel; and Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Her notable essays include "The Gilded Gaze: Wealth and Economies on the Colonial Frontier," in the documenta 14 Reader; "Outlawed Social Life," in South as a State of Mind; and "The Appropriation Debates (or The Gallows of History)," in Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value (New Museum/MIT Press, 2020). 

Photo: Thatcher Keats