Dr. Les Joynes

Art Curating and Advisory

“Curating establishes agency between the artist’s creativity and the viewer.”

How can we give agency to art? And how can we explore new ways to engage both traditional, modern and contemporary art? How can we examine how art gives agency to our diverse identities? How can we showcase new generations of artists that are exploring new interfaces of materials and ideas? And finally, how can we re-vision art spaces in museums, galleries, public spaces and the home as a private museum?

Curating is not just about displaying artworks in a space. Curating is about thoughtful planning, presentation, writing that expresses a collection of art works cohesively within a guiding theme. Curating is a poetic process. As an award winning artist, Dr Les Joynes is curating agency - exploring new ways to experience art in the 21st century.

About Dr. Les Joynes: Discovering New Ways to Engage Art

An honours graduate of Central St. Martins (BA) and Goldsmiths (MA), Dr. Les Joynes began curating in 1994 in London. He served as head curator for Networking, a multi-museum exhibition in Tokyo which commemorated the Japan-UK Cultural Year in 1998. He later served on the curatorial team that produced the first Taipei International Biennial “Sites of Desire” in Taiwan. Joynes has gone on to curate, design and produce exhibitions in Japan, South Korea, France, Singapore, Mongolia, China, and most recently, India at Bikaner House in New Delhi, where he is recipient of the 2022 Fulbright-Nehru Professional and Academic Excellence Award, and served as Senior Scholar on Art and Performance at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA). As recipient of Fulbright-Hays US Public Diplomacy Awards, he now curates exhibitions which examine not only local cultures and traditions but also contemporary interpretations. He has lectured on the future of curating at the Bard College Program in St Petersburg.

A selection of curating projects include: “Roop Kaur Sandhu, My Legacy, My Colour” Bikaner House, New Delhi, India (2022); “Across Borders - the Wall” Inside Out Art Museum, Beijing (2017) Fulbright Hays US Public Diplomacy Award; “Ritual, Performance and Contemporary Art” US-Mongolian Collaborations Zanabazar Museum of Fine Art, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia; Brazilian Museum of Sculpture (2012); “FormLAB” Treignac Projet, France (2010); “Excavating neighborhoods” Seoul Foundation for the Arts, Seoul, South Korea (2009); “Cities of Tomorrow” Bauhaus in Singapore (2009); “Animism” Åmotgård Museum, Bygstad, Norway (2009); Inaugural Taipei Biennial, Taiwan (1998); Norimatsu Museum, Matsuyama, Japan (1997); Milch Gallery, London (1997); Disclosure: New Contemporary Art from The Slade and St. Martins, London (1993). He now prepares“Collaborative Spaces Colombo,” Colombo National Museum, Sri Lanka (2024) as well as an exhibition for Lalith Akademi, Kerala. (2024)

Dr. Joynes is a senior editor for ProjectAnywhere, a leading art journal in Australia dedicated to site specific art. Contributing art criticism since 1997, his articles have featured in Art in America, Flash Art, Chithravathi Magazine, Kerala, Springer and the Journal For Artistic Research (JAR). A research scholar at the Columbia University Department of Art History and Archeology, he was invited to research the future of museums and presented on museums at Museum 2050, a conference at the Long Museum, Shanghai. A long time member of the College Arts Association (CAA) in New York, Dr Joynes serves on the CAA Museum Committee. He is founder of Museum.coach a platform for building leadership in museums. In 2019, he initiated coaching at the Yale Museum of British Art at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. He serves as a Visiting Professor of Art and Art History at the Institute of Interdisciplinary Arts at Visva Bharati University in Santiniketan, West Bengal and as a curriculum advisor at Sir JJ School of Art in Mumbai and is Professor of Record for Art and Art History at Renmin University Beijing. He has conducted museum research for the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum and lectured at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, University of Cambridge, Teachers College, Peking University Institute of Cultural Industries, University of California Santa Barbara, University of the Arts London (UAL), University of Coventry, and the Bard-Smolny Program in St Petersburg.

As a museums scholar Dr Joynes is a member of the American Alliance of Art Museums. He is Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, London, the Royal Geographical Society London and the Royal Asiatic Society. He completed his BA Fine Art From Central St Martins College of Art, MA Fine Art from Goldsmiths, London, Masters in Fine Art from Musashino Art University, Japan, PhD from the School of Art, Environment and Technology, at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK, Post-Doctorate at University of Sao Paolo in Brazil, MBA from California State University, and M.Sc from Boston University and the Vrije Universiteit Brussels Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences. At Columbia University, he researches the futures of art education and has advised the Gandhi Institute of Technology and Management (GITAM) in India on curriculum design. Also working in new media, Dr. Joynes is a member of the US Department of State American Arts Incubator Arts & Technology Network. An avid traveler, Dr. Joynes has spent the past 35 years residing in the US, UK, Japan, France, Germany, Brazil, China and India. He speaks French, Italian, German, Japanese and is learning Mandarin Chinese.