Postponed: 2nd annual Juried Exhibition

About the Juror:

Jen Mergel is a Boston-born-and-based contemporary art curator known for her fierce commitment to her hometown. She has organized more than 50 exhibitions for wide-ranging museum, academic and public audiences. Her current research focuses on the social justice and protest legacy of Nancy Spero’s underknown (and censored) public art. In 2019, she served as Guest Editor-At-Large for Boston Art Review Magazine: The Public Art Issue, and produced a roundtable of numerous intergenerational voices across the spectrum of arts making, criticism, history, education, and social-spatial cultural justice to critically explore the “public” in public art. In 2018, Mergel was Curator of the Platform section of The Armory Show in New York and presented fifteen site-responsive artist commissions and installations under the theme The Contingent; and in Boston, she organized the award-winning citywide public art exhibition, Fog x FLO: Fujiko Nakaya on the Emerald Necklace. Recognized for her expertise with artist interviews, she leads national workshops for VoCA (Voices in Contemporary Art), most recently at MoMA and LACMA, and her published/archived interviews include those with Tory Fair, Jeffrey Gibson, Shinique Smith, and Patrick Strzelec.

Mergel served as the Vice President for the Association of Art Museum Curator from 2016-19, and remains a voting board member through 2021. From 2010-2017, Mergel was the Beal Family Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), where she was also the Interim Chair of the Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art. Her MFA presentations included the touring exhibition Permission to be Global/Prácticas Globales; the U.S. museum debut Lee Mingwei: Sonic Blossom; and Darkness Made Visible: Derek Jarman and Mark Bradford. Previously at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art from 2005-2010, Mergel organized touring survey exhibitions of artists Tara Donovan and Charles LeDray and numerous thematic shows, including Acting Out: Social Experiments in Video. Prior curatorial projects include those at the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy Andover, the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, and the 2004 Whitney Biennial. 

Mergel graduated summa cum laude in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard University, received her M.A. from Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies, is a 2017 Fellow of the Center for Curatorial Leadership, and continues her studies through the Racial Equity Institute. She is Founding Director of the Curatorial Network Accelerator of Boston, a nascent program that fosters citywide partnerships to expand cultural equity, collaboration, audience and community through art presentations.