CURATOR TALK: MATTHEW HIGGS / "Between the Audience and the Stage"
Tuesday May 18, doors open 6:30 PM

Since 2001 Matthew Higgs has been the Curator at the CCA Wattis Institute of Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, California, where his exhibitions include: "Likeness: Portraits of Artists by Other Artists" , "To Whom It May Concern", "Mixtapes", and "Baja to Vancouver: The West Coast and Contemporary Art" (2003/04 - in collaboration with the Seattle Art Museum, san Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Vancouver Art Gallery). Prior to his arrival in San Francisco he was the Associate Director of Exhibitions at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts - where he organized exhibitions of the work of Mark Leckey, Oliver Payne & Nick Relph, Jim Shaw, Richard Kern, amongst others.

His talk 'Between the audience and the stage', will chart Higgs' development from his Northern England teenage years in the late 1970s when he published the fanzine 'Photophobia' and was an occasional concert promoter. Higgs promoted New Order's first ever publicised UK show in January 1981, when he was 16, through his early curatorial projects, to his more recent exhibitions. Higgs' most recent exhibition - a survey of the work of Christopher Knowles - will open at Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York on the 22 May 2004.