Temple University

ON LEAVE, FALL 2024 & SPRING 2025

Alpesh Kantilal Patel’s (they/he) art historical scholarship, curatorial projects, and art criticism reflect their queer, transcultural, and decolonial approach to global contemporary art as evidenced by their most recent research output: contributions to the anthologies The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History and Contemporary Art in a Global Framework (both 2023) and a peer-reviewed article on a transgender studies meets art history course they taught. Previously editor of contemporary art book reviews for caa.reviews and former chair of the editorial board of Art Journal and Art Journal Open, Patel is on the Getty Research Journal’s editorial board.

Their widely reviewed book Productive Failure: writing queer, transnational South Asian art histories (2017) was supported by NEH and British Arts Council grants, among others. Patel is co-editor of the anthology Storytellers of Art Histories (2022), which brings together first-person narratives of an intergenerational group of art historians, curators, artists, and archivists, who are shaping how contemporary art history is written; a special journal issue of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art (2021) commemorating Okwui Enwezor; and editor of five exhibition catalogs published in conjunction with shows Patel curated at Miami Beach Urban Studios (MBUS). As the 2023 curator-at-large at UrbanGlass, New York City, they organized a series of exhibitions under the theme “Forever Becoming: Decolonization, Materiality, and Trans*Subjectivity.”

Patel spent their academic career in programs embedded in art schools. As a Critical Studies Fellow at Cranbrook Art Academy, they gave keynote lectures on “Artistic Practice as Theory and Entangle with the World.” Patel was the director of the MFA program in Visual Arts and Curatorial Practice at Florida International University (FIU), where they were based for a decade.

Their forthcoming book Multiple and One: Writing Queer Global Art Histories is supported by a Fulbright grant to Poland and residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts and Loughborough University’s Institute of Advanced Studies in England. A dossier exploring Trans-Asia will be published in the Association of the Arts of the Present/Journal (2025), for which they are the associate editor of visual arts, architecture, and art history.

PhD, Art History and Visual Studies, University of Manchester, England, 2009 

BA, History of Art, Yale University, 1997 

Selected Work 

Patel A. (2024) Forever Becoming: Teaching “Transgender Studies Meets Art History” and Theorizing Trans Joy. Arts. 13(4):115. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts13040115 

Patel, A (2023-4). Three exhibitions organized under the theme “Forever Becoming: Decolonization, Materiality, and Trans*Subjectivity.”  UrbanGlass, New York City 

Patel, A. (2023b) "Post/Anti/Neo/De-Colonial Theory and Visual Analysis." Pp. 311-326 in Amelia Jones and Jane Chin Davidson (eds.). A Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell. 

Patel, A. (2023a) "Reflecting on Whiteness in Recent Contemporary Artwork Exploring Transnational Poland," Pp. 363-373 in Tatiana Flores, Florencia San Martin and Charlene Villaseñor Black (eds.). The Routledge Companion to Decolonizing Art History. London: Routledge.

Patel, A. & Siddiqui, Y., eds. (2022). Storytellers of Art Histories: Living and Sustaining a Creative Life. Bristol: Intellect Books. https://www.intellectbooks.com/storytellers-of-art-histories 

Patel, A., Davidson, J.C. & Okeke-Agulu, C., eds. (2021). “Curatorial Impacts – the Futures of Okwui Enwezor (1963–2019).” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 48(1). https://www.dukeupress.edu/okwui-enwezor 

Patel, A. (2017). Productive failure: Writing queer transnational South Asian art histories. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781784992545/