2023; photo: Kameron Herndon; courtesy Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Matthew Villar Miranda studies queer relations, Indigenous knowledge systems, and decolonial interventions by artists of the imagined and material tropics, especially within the Austronesian Pacific and its diaspora. Previously at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, they worked on eleven exhibitions, including curating solo presentations by artists Stephanie Syjuco and Sky Hopinka, and assisting with Routed West: Twentieth-Century African American Quilts in California. As a Visual Arts Curatorial Fellow at the Walker Art Center, they contributed to exhibitions by Paul Chan, Pao Houa Her, and Pacita Abad. In 2021, as a Los Angeles County Museum of Art–Arizona State University fellow, they co-curated Undoing Time: Art and Histories of Incarceration at the Arizona State University Art Museum, with support from the Art for Justice Fund. Matthew serves on the Board of Stakeholders for Museums Moving Forward (MMF), a Ford and Mellon Foundation-funded initiative comprised of a cross-institutional coalition dedicated to advancing equity within art museums. Their most recent exhibition at the San Francisco Arts Commission, Dream Jungle, dialogues with Jessica Hagedorn's novel, and explores tropical counter-ethnography through the (de)construction of performance.