Emerging Curator Competition and  The ROCI Road to Peace: Experiments in the Unfamiliar, Academy Art Museum, Easton, Maryland, Dec. 5, 2015–March 6, 2016

The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation partnered with Artsy to organize the Emerging Curator Competition, which elicited 138 submissions from five continents, thirteen countries, and seventy-eight cities. Five leaders in the art world—John Elderfield, Branden W. Joseph, Shirin Neshat, Christopher Rauschenberg, and Sarah Roberts—selected four finalists. The public ultimately determined the winner by voting on social media. Nicole Bray, then a master’s student at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, developed her winning entry into the exhibition The ROCI Road to Peace: Experiments in the Unfamiliar, presented at the Academy Art Museum (AAM), Easton, Maryland in 2015–16. Complementing a concurrent AAM exhibition featuring works from the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI, 1984–91), Bray brought together a group of contemporary artists whose new media works extended the ethos of ROCI into the twenty-first century. In addition to a thought-provoking selection of works by Fikret Atay, Yto Barrada, Alfredo Jaar, Jawshing Arthur Liou, Pedro Reyes, Sebastian Schmieg, and Małgosia Woźnica (V5MT), Bray launched an international call for submissions by student artists. Artsy once again provided the platform and applicants hailed from Brazil, France, Iran, Peru, Puerto Rico, Romania, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Five students were selected for a digital presentation as part of The ROCI Road to Peace: Andrew Dines, Matthew Flores, Jeffrey Gomez, Ana Lucia Romero Rivero, and Ziyang Wu.

Read more about this collaboration >