Karen Archey
Karen Archey is an American art critic and curator based in New York City and Amsterdam. She is the Curator of Contemporary Art and Time-Based Media at Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the former editor of e-flux.
Archey regularly speaks on issues related to contemporary art, feminism, and technology at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. She has written for publications such as Art in America, ArtReview, ''frieze, and Spike Art Quarterly'', and she has contributed essays to publications of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York.
Biography
Archey received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Visual and Critical Studies in 2008 from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.Archey was the Curator-in-Residence at the Abrons Arts Center in New York from 2012 to 2013. She also served as the Editor-at-Large of Rhizome at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. She contributed the essay Bodies in Space: Gender and Sexuality in the Online Public Sphere to the 2015 publication Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century, co-published by the MIT Press and New Museum as part of the series Critical Anthologies in Art and Culture.
In 2014 in Beijing, Archey co-curated the survey exhibition Art Post-Internet at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art with Robin Peckham and edited the freely available publication Art Post-internet: Information/Data. Trevor Smith of Hyperallergic wrote that Archey and Peckham's exhibition and catalog "solidified the term “post-internet art” in our vocabulary". Archey and Peckham describe Internet art as: "post-Internet refers not to a time ‘after’ the Internet but rather to an Internet state of mind — to think in the fashion of the network.” They go on to write in the catalogue:
Archey joined e-flux in 2014. While editor at e-flux, she began the web publishing platform Conversations. She remained the editor of Conversations until 2017.
She has contributed reviews to numerous contemporary arts publications, such as ArtReview and Art-Agenda. In 2015, Archey received a Creative Capital grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for short-form writing.
In 2017, Archey was appointed the Curator of Contemporary Art for Time-Based Media of Stedelijk Museum.
Archey founded Women, Inc. a group that supports women in the arts at the early stages of their careers.
Exhibitions
Images Rendered Bare. Vacant. Recognizable, Stadium, New York City, 2012Bcc #7, Stadium, New York City, 2012Deleuze & Co., Stadium, New York City, 2012How to Eclipse the Light, Wilkinson, London, 2012Deep Spaces, Joe Sheftel Gallery, New York City, 2012Harm van den Dorpel, Abrons Art Center, New York City, 2013Hymns for Mr. Suzuki, Abrons Art Center, New York City, 2013Art Post-Internet, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China, 2014Sharing Love, Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art, Portland, 2016Selected writings
Hack Life, Art Papers, November/December 2013- "Hyper-Elasticity Symptoms, Signs Treatment: On Hito Steyerl's Liquidity Inc." within Too Much World: The Films of Hito Steyerl, edited by Nick Aikens; Sternberg Press, Van Abbemuseum and Institute of Modern Art, 2014Art Post-Internet: Information/Data, edited with Robin Peckham, 2014Bodies in Space: Gender and Sexuality in the Online Public Sphere, within Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Lauren Cornell and Ed Halter; MIT Press and New Museum, 2015Embodied Differences: New Images of the Monstrous and Cyborg in Contemporary Art, within Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016, edited by Chrissie Isles; Whitney Museum of American Art, 2016