A River Runs Through It: ICI’s Mississippi River Project

Please join Gertie and Independent Curators International (ICI) for a pair of panel discussions
that explore ICI’s Mississippi River Project
About this Event

Please join Gertie and Independent Curators International (ICI) for a pair of panel discussions that build on Chicago’s role as a meeting point for innovative culture, ideas, and people from the

Midwest and beyond. By highlighting the practices of four Chicago-based curators involved in ICI’s ongoing research initiative known as the Mississippi River Project, the discussions will explore what happens when curators engage with a region through a connective lens of its river and watershed, rather than its borders and individual states.

Launched in 2021, the Project uses the Mississippi River—its immense basin, delta and outflow, and the Gulf of Mexico—as a system through which to generate new approaches to U.S. history, civic life, and art communities. The project’s programs, exhibition-making, fellowships, and collective curatorial research platforms align along a common goal: to convene curators, artists, and art spaces in order to collectively re-imagine the United States’s identity. It aims to transcend rigid political, social, and economic definitions of the U.S. through a focus on the river, the lands it connects, the histories it weaves together, and the cultural flows it has enabled.

Panel 1: 1–2:30 pm

Speakers: Brandon Alvendia (independent curator), Risa Puleo (independent curator), moderated by Renaud Proch (Executive and Artistic Director, ICI)

Short break: 2:30–2:45 pm

Panel 2: 2:45–4 pm

Speakers: Denny Mwaura (Assistant Director & Curator, Gallery 400), Pia Singh (independent curator), moderated by Scott Vincent Campbell (Midwest Programs Manager, ICI)

Brandon Alvendia

Brandon Alvendia, an artist, curator, and educator, actively promotes artist-run initiatives across North America, fostering community-driven exhibitions, events, and publications. As Co-Founder of artLedge, BEN RUSSELL, The Storefront, and Silver Galleon Press, he served as Independent Curators International's Curatorial Research Fellow in 2021, focusing on projects in the Mississippi River Basin. He also spearheaded the revival of the MdW project, expanding its reach across the central Midwest to support a growing ecosystem of hyperlocal art scenes from the region, working together to build lasting coalitions of purposeful, artist-led action.

In addition to his curatorial work, Brandon has extensive teaching experience at institutions including the School of The Art Institute, UIC, and Columbia College, all located in Chicago, as well as the Maine College of Art in Portland, ME. Brandon holds degrees from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago. Additionally, he has participated in programs such as the Copycat Academy in Toronto and the ICI Curatorial Intensive in New Orleans. Recipient of Spring 2024 Curatorial Research Fellowship Grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Risa Puleo

Risa Puleo is an independent curator and one of a team of curators who organized the 2023 Counterpublics Triennial in St. Louis. Her exhibition Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the American Justice System, curated for The Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston and hosted by Tufts University Art Gallery, mapped the relationship of the Pr*son to the museum. Monarchs: Brown and Native Contemporary Artists in the Path of the Butterfly conceptually redrew settler-imposed boundaries to reconnect the Americas as continuous indigenous land. Monarchs was curated for Bemis Center for Contemporary Art during her year as the inaugural curator-in-residence, and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Blue Star Art Space and Southwest School of Art in San Antonio, The Nerman Art Museum in Overland Park, Kansas. Puleo has Master’s degrees from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and Hunter College and is a doctoral candidate in Northwestern University’s art history program. She has written for Art in America, Art Papers, Art 21, Asia Art Pacific, Hyperallergic, Modern Painters, and other publications.

Denny Mwaura

Denny Mwaura is a curator and writer with a practice invested in the social histories of Black life, life under political economies, and overlooked narratives of Chicago's creative communities. He is Assistant Director and Curator of Gallery 400 at the University of Illinois Chicago where he organizes exhibitions and programs including Press & Pull: A Legacy of the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop (2026), Imagination Doctors (2026), Maria Gaspar: We Lit the Fire and Trusted the Heat (2025), Learning Together: Art Education and Community (2024), and The Mask of Prosperity (2024).

He was Program Manager for the Black Arts Movement School Modality and has published in the Boston Art Review, E-Flux, Frieze, Jupiter Magazine, MIT Press, and New Art Examiner. Mwaura received his MA in Modern and Contemporary Art History from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a recipient of the Schiff Foundation Fellowship for Critical Architectural Writing, awarded by the Art Institute of Chicago’s Department of Architecture and Design.

Pia Singh

Pia Singh is an independent curator and art critic from Bombay, living and working in Chicago. Over 18 years, Singh has been dedicated to bolstering artists' practices through exhibitions, writing, and peer-to-peer mentorship. Academically, her research focuses on community-engaged arts at the intersection of contemporary art and design thinking, challenging structural and pedagogical hierarchies within and outside of which artists create systemic change. Singh’s writing has been published by Sixty Inches from Center, Chicago Reader, Brooklyn Rail, Frieze, ArtReview, CAA Journals, Portable Gray, Hyperallergic, Cultured, ArtReview, ArtIndia, and Tussle Magazine. She has served as Critic-in-Residence at The Luminary (St. Louis); Bemis Center (Omaha); and Curatorial Advisor for 3Arts/Bodies of Work Fellowship (Chicago). She is currently the Mississippi River Basin Fellow for 2026 at Independent Curators International (N.Y./Chicago)