Kellie Riggs is an independent curator, writer, lecturer and fine jeweler with a background in art jewelry and craft-based processes. Viewing curating as a generative creative practice, she is currently most interested in notions of making as being, the absurdity of reference culture and “sleeper cell trends”, and the intersections of commodity and art.
Kellie is currently the co-curator of design Triennial Objects: USA 2024 with New York gallery R & Company. Her most recent previous project, Under the Wobble Moon, Objects form the Capricious Age, at Villa Stuck in Munich, Germany (April – August 2022), was American designer Misha Kahn’s first solo museum show, and his largest presentation of works to date. In 2022 Kellie was also at the Dallas Museum of Art where she assisted with the exhibition Cartier and Islamic Art: In Search of Modernity.
Previous projects include 2019’s Non-Stick Nostalgia: Y2K Retrofuturism in Contemporary Jewelry, at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, where Kellie was invited as a guest curator. Exhibiting twenty-nine millennial art jewelers from all over the world, the large-scale show was a timely, critically acclaimed project that discussed analog vs. digital identity formation, self-actualization through image and adornment and virtual alter egos. Kellie is also the creator of the reoccurring artist-run exhibition FOTOCOPY, which since 2018 has had editions in Munich, New York, Venice and just recently Amsterdam. In 2016 she co-curated the exhibition CULT at the Design Museum den Bosch (formally the Stedelijk Musuem ‘s-Hertogenbosch), NL, which dealt with the elusive ways jewelry relates to participation and belonging.
As a writer and editor, Kellie has contributed to an array of national and international publications over the last ten years, namely Dutch magazine and platform Current Obsession, for whom she was Editor from 2015 – 2018. She has also been a visiting lecturer at St. Lucas Antwerpen, SUNY New Paltz, and more, including part time faculty at Rhode Island School of Design. She was awarded a Fulbright Grant to Italy in 2011 where she is still primarily based. She received her BFA in Jewelry + Metalsmithing at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2011, and an MA in Visual Art Administration at New York University in 2020.
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