Steven Lam is dean and Jill and Peter Kraus Distinguished Chair in the School of Art at CalArts. As an curator, Lam has produced curatorial projects that address a diverse range of questions, such as the legacy of AIDS activism in contemporary art, the relationship between financialization and abstraction within the rural American landscape, and the politics and forms of secrecy. His artistic and curatorial work has been featured in the New York Times, Brooklyn Rail, Artforum, Flash Art, ThirdText, and various other international and academic publications.
Lam’s previous artistic and curatorial work has focused on: hybrid cultural and social research that counters extractionist modes of being and multi-species and ecological encounters; archival and memory work that invokes spectrality, radical time in the aftermath of war; critiques of the creative industries and their impact on art education and urbanization; and art activism and spatial politics in Hong Kong and China.
He’s currently working on a project that investigates the role of artistic research as a misfit producer in a time of war and shock innovation. By investigating archival research affiliated with Dow Chemicals and the invention of napalm, Lam’s project looks to the long history of Asian American immigration and its connection with war and refuge. This recent body of work looks to chemistry and complicity, research and protest, work and refusing to work in an era of permanent war and toxicity. He also recently published an interview with CalArts faculty member Shirley Tse in Sculpture Magazine and is currently working on an essay on the work of long-time Canadian artist and educator Will Kwan around real estate, COVID, and finance.
Providing stewardship and advocacy for public cultural institutions has been central to Lam’s professional and community-centered work. Lam has worked in a university context for nearly two decades as a faculty member in New York City and Canada. Prior to his appointment at CalArts, Lam was director and associate professor at Purchase College, School of Art+Design; associate dean at the School of Art at The Cooper Union; and associate vice president and dean of Graduate Studies at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Initially trained as an artist, Lam received his MFA from the University of California, Irvine and was Helena Rubinstein fellow in curatorial studies at the Whitney Museum Independent Study program.
