Renée Ridgway

Renée Ridgway is an artist, free-lance curator, writer and educator based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Since completing her studies in fine art at the Rhode Island School of Design, (BFA) and Piet Zwart Institute (MA), she has exhibited widely in the Netherlands and internationally (P.S.1 MoMA Hotel New York, Centraal Museum Utrecht, Gouda Museum), made numerous public presentations at various conferences and forums and taught at several universities in the Netherlands and abroad. From 2005-6 she served on the board of the former Gate Foundation, whose artists archive and library were given as a gift to the Van Abbemuseum, where in 2007 she organised a panel as part of the Be(com)ing Dutch caucus, entitled ‘Gate Foundation- Past, Present and Future’.

Ridgway organises Negotiating Equity, a collaborative project at DAI, (Dutch Art Institute Masters Programme ARTEZ) which investigates curation as artistic practice and involves the n.e.w.s. platform and her contributors. Negotiating Equity aims to offer a participatory platform to address the ethics and practice of curatorship as a mode of art production, asserting that these terms of engagement imply rethinking the economic and social conditions of art. Negotiating Equity draws upon theories of fairness in questioning divergent value systems and testing artistic models amongst students, curators, artists, art critics and writers from around the world.

Ridgway’s curatorial and collaborational practice has investigated alter egos and constructed identities- Migrating Identity-Identifying the Migrant 2001, cat., the unseen other in society- Migrating Identity-Transmission/Reconstruction 2004, cat., sovereignty- (Third Space in the Fourth World 2003, cat.) and the boundaries of otherness- Another Publication 2007, cat. (available at Revolver Books) Ridgway's writings have been published in MITR, Paraeducation-The Metropolitan Complex, Pages Supplement. Ridgway recently presented ‘Ruminations of Remuneration’ at ISEA 2009, a presentation that offers and intimate look at paid online content using the successes and failures of n.e.w.s. the past year as an artistic paradigm.

As an artist Ridgway focuses on the value of the contemporary ‘cultural currency’ of Dutchness, in relation to the Dutch colonial past (US, Indonesia, South Africa, Suriname, etc.). The most recent installment 'Beaver, Wampum, Hoes'' – is a series of installations and public interventions at various locations in and around NYC and the Netherlands. In September she presented 'Wampum Trail' at the Conflux festival in NYC at this summer, ‘Holland Mania’ at the Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal in Leiden. Ridgway has completed residencies at Art3, Valence (1999), Hotel New York, P.S.1. MoMA (2000), European Atelier Programme, Weimar (2000), Künstlerhaus Bethanian, Berlin (2003), Sculpture Space (2005) and Pilotprojekt Gropiusstadt, Berlin (2008) while having worked in China, France, U.S. and India on site-specific projects. Please see her website for more info.

Ridgway is a co-initiator of n.e.w.s.