About the Author

Carolyn Bell Farrell

Carolyn Bell Farrell is an independent curator and writer living in London, Ontario, and a PhD candidate in Art and Visual Culture at Western University. Since 1990, she has curated more than sixty exhibitions of contemporary art and has contributed as many essays for exhibition publications. Over the last four decades, Bell Farrell has worked in public art galleries, arts service organizations, and artist-run centres, holding positions of director, curator, program coordinator, and education officer. From 2007 to 2020, she was Executive Director of the MacLaren Art Centre, the regional public art gallery serving the city of Barrie and Simcoe County. While in Barrie, she chaired the Barrie Public Art Committee and Georgian College’s Fine Arts Advisory Committee. She also taught museum management in the college’s Museum and Gallery Studies program.

 

Prior to joining the MacLaren Art Centre, Bell Farrell was Senior Curator of the Koffler Gallery in Toronto, where she initiated a program exploring the complexities of personal and cultural memory and identity from different perspectives to contextualize the contemporary experiences of religious and secular Jews living in the Diaspora. These exhibitions, presented between 1994 and 2007, featured work by artists Isaac Applebaum, Rafael Goldchain, Mindy Yan Miller, Ed Pien, Sarindar Dhaliwal, June Clark, Tim Whiten, Rebecca Baird, FASTWÜRMS, Blue Republic, Norman White, Lois Andison, and Cathy Daley, among others.

 

Between 1990 and 1994, Bell Farrell curated twelve exhibitions for Oakville Galleries, initiating the institution’s contemporary art program. While based in Toronto, she was also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at York University and a member of the City of Toronto’s newly formed Art Committee for Public Places, created to encourage public art on public land.