Jordan Karney Chaim

Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego
Curator

Jordan Karney Chaim is a contemporary art historian and curator of the Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego. Her research and writing has centered on the intersections of art and community, focusing on emerging artists and institutional histories in the United States. Her most recent writing can be found in East of Borneo, Hyperallergic and HereIn Journal.

Jordan holds a doctorate in History of Art & Architecture from Boston University where she was a Raymond and Margaret Horowitz Foundation Fellow in American Art. Her dissertation, Do It Yourselves: Alternative Spaces and the Rise of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, 1970-1990, examines the origins of three exhibition spaces (The Woman’s Building, Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) in order to illustrate how a flourishing network of alternative spaces became one of Los Angeles’s most significant art-historical developments in the latter half of the twentieth century.

In 2016, Jordan curated the exhibition Martine Gutierrez: True Story at the Faye G., Jo, and James Stone Gallery, Boston University. From 2007 to 2012 she was the Assistant Director at Mary Ryan Gallery in New York. While at the gallery, she organized the first traveling retrospective of the painter and printmaker Yvonne Jacquette’s woodcuts and produced an accompanying catalogue raisonné. She also curated a reinterpretation of the feminist icon May Stevens’s 1988 New Museum exhibition, One Plus or Minus One.

She serves on the board of the May Stevens & Rudolph Baranik Foundation (New York), and The Hill Street Country Club (Oceanside, CA). 

Jordan Karney Chaim will visit Vienna on an individual research trip in November 2024.

Jordan Karney Chaim. Photo: Christie Turner