Ryan Inouye

Biography

Ryan Inouye is Senior Curator at Sharjah Art Foundation, where he has organised exhibitions featuring artists of his generation and contributed to a broad range of programming initiatives.

Ryan Inouye is Senior Curator at Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF), where he has worked since 2017. In this post, he has organised exhibitions featuring artists of his generation, contributed to a broad range of programming initiatives and worked across departments to develop best practices during a period of the accelerated growth at the foundation. Previously, he was associate curator of Sharjah Biennial 12 (2014–15). He served as assistant curator and curatorial assistant at the New Museum, New York, here he focused on the 2012 New Museum Triennial: The Ungovernables, and the Museum as Hub initiative, an international partnership of art organisations in Cairo, Eindhoven, Mexico City, New York, and Seoul (2010–13). Prior to these positions, he was curatorial assistant at REDCAT, Los Angeles (2006–10).

Select exhibitions and curatorial projects at SAF include: Rayyane Tabet: Exquisite Corpse (2021), Surface Tension (2019) and Ala Younis: Steps Toward the Impossible (2018). He also co-organised the 2018 edition of the annual March Meeting: Active Forms, which explored concepts of non-oppositional resistance. At the New Museum, he co-organised the Museum as Hub exhibition Steffani Jemison and Jamal Cyrus: Alpha’s Bet Is Not Over Yet, an exhibition, reading room and discussion space, which explored the history of independently published Black periodicals from the first half of the twentieth century.

He has contributed texts on the work of Abraham Cruzvillegas, Iman Issa, Rayyane Tabet, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Ala Younis, among others.

Inouye is the recipient of a Foundation for Art initiatives grant (2013).

He holds a B.A in English Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles (2006) and an MRes in Curatorial/Knowledge, Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, London (2016).

SAF Participation
Sharjah Biennial 12
March Meeting 2014, 2018, 2021
Ala Younis: Steps Toward the Impossible
Surface Tension
Rayyane Tabet: Exquisite Corpse