Tatiana Mellema Appointed The Belkin’s Curator of Outdoor Art

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Tatiana Mellema (photo courtesy of Belkin Gallery)

Tatiana Mellema has been appointed as the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery’s new curator of outdoor art.

She will start the position Aug. 14. 

Mellema holds a master of arts in art history from Concordia University and a PhD in art history from the University of British Columbia. She has worked as a public art planner for the City of Vancouver since 2018, and before that, she held positions at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Banff Centre, the National Gallery and at the Belkin as curator of academic programs.

“I am excited to develop a curatorial program in outdoor art with artists whose practices address the extraction of value from land and labour,” said Mellema in a news release. 

“For the past eight years, my research has focused on historical discourses of ‘institutional critique’ and what change means at an individual and institutional level. I have looked to artists whose works index the gendered and racialized subject as a real everyday abstraction that the institution relies upon, and this has shaped my ongoing research, teaching and curatorial work that is committed to fostering critical practice.”

During her role at the City of Vancouver, Mellema helped bring about major public art commissions, including Weekend Chime (2021) by Brady Cranfield, A Constellation of Remediation (2021) by T'uy't'tanat-Cease Wyss and Anne Riley and Saltwater City Vancouver (2020) by Paul Wong. 

She is currently working on a book about North American artists in the 1970s and the engagement of socially reproductive labour.

The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery is located on the campus of the University of British Columbia, in a building designed by architect Peter Cardew.

Source: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery

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