I am a Chicagoan in Toronto, a parent, and an autodidact. As a teenager, I came to punk rock and the internet nearly simultaneously. Ever since, I’ve favored independent culture and communities.

I am passionate about publishing and media, bike riding, places and their pasts, libraries, NBA basketball, ambient and experimental electronic music, photography and contemporary art, baking, and good software.

I am the cofounder of Valise, a fast, simple inventory tool that gives artists peace of mind. I have also worked for two decades as an editor, writer, and curator—and increasingly am invited by organizations to help shape the strategies of projects that I then lead.

Presently, I work part-time as a writer and editor on the content and communications team at Notion, and as the editorial director of Frontier, a design office in Toronto.

In recent years I have partnered with Snap Inc., The Image Centre, FRONT International, Composer, the Moderna Museet, the Clark Art Institute, MIT Press, Diamond Schmitt Architects, the Honnold Foundation, Antikythera, the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, and others.

I arrived here through work in the contemporary art world. I spent a decade in arts publishing, including five years on the editorial staff of Artforum and nearly two years at Aperture Foundation. In that time I wrote hundreds of reviews and reported pieces, plus essays for institutions like the Venice Biennale, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum. My two books are Kentucky Renaissance and Art’s Biggest Stage. I still occasionally contribute to exhibition catalogues, artist books, and art magazines.

In 2013, I moved to the institutional side of the art world by joining the Cincinnati Art Museum as its curator of photography. I later became executive director of Gallery TPW, a nonprofit artist-run center, before going independent.

I am married to artist Julia Dault. We have two children, Walker and Rowan.

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Email me at brian@sholis.com or follow me via RSS.

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Last updated November 7, 2024