Renée Ridgway
Renée Ridgway is an artist, freelance curator, writer, and educator based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Ridgway is co-initiator of and contributor to n.e.w.s. She is a PhD fellow at Copenhagen Business School in their Management, Philosophy and Politics department in cooperation with Leuphana University’s Digital Cultures Research Lab. Her current research merges artistic and curatorial practice with digital economies in regard to online remuneration along with investigating the conceptual as well as technological implications of ‘search’. Her writings on contemporary art and its complicities can be found at n.e.w.s., with recent contributions to publications OPEN! and Disrupting Business (Autonomedia, 2013).
She studied fine art at the Rhode Island School of Design (BFA) and Piet Zwart Institute (MA). Her international exhibitions include Manifesta8, P.S.1 MoMA Hotel New York, Centraal Museum Utrecht, Museum De Lakenhal, Gouda Museum, and Conflux Festival. The notion of the ‘redistribution of space’, its fundamental relation to land and territory as currency, commodity and capital are intertwined within her research and installations. Ridgway's Beaver, Wampum, Hoes (2000-ongoing) is a series of mixed media installations and public interventions at various locations in and around NYC and the Netherlands that focuses on the value of the contemporary ‘cultural currency’, in relation to the Dutch colonial past and its contemporary repercussions.
Past educational and curatorial projects include Welcome to Econotopia - commons of the contemporary at the Dutch Art Institute (DAI) Masters Programme ARTEZ, a year-long project that addresses spaces of transgression, ranging from institutions of culture to contemporary hubs of spectacle to the internet. Her recent Marfa Summer School curriculum unfolded around the notion of ‘Border Currencies’ as a series of performative field-trips, lectures and interventions in and around Marfa, Texas. Ridgway organised Negotiating Equity from 2009-2012, a collaborative project at DAI, which investigates curation as artistic practice and involves the n.e.w.s. platform and her contributors. Negotiating Equity drew 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. 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 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), Pilotprojekt Gropiusstadt, Berlin (2008), Studio Lichtenberg (2014) whilst having worked in China, France, U.S. and India on site-specific projects.
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