Gridthiya Gaweewong Selected as 2025 Recipient of Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence
Amber Esseiva (CCS Bard ’15) to Receive CCS Bard Alumni Award
Awardees to be Honored at CCS Bard’s Spring 2025 Gala
Today the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) announces Gridthiya Gaweewong as the recipient of its 2025 Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence.Awardees to be Honored at CCS Bard’s Spring 2025 Gala
Currently the Artistic Director of the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok, Gaweewong has dedicated her career to championing contemporary Thai artists and developing a curatorial practice addressing the social transformation faced by artists from Thailand and beyond following the Cold War. An independent panel of leading curators, artists, and museum directors selected Gaweewong to receive the annual award, which is accompanied by a $25,000 prize and was launched in 1998 to honor the outstanding achievements of curators who bring innovative thinking, bold vision, and dedicated service to the field of exhibition-making.
“Gridthiya’s curatorial approach, which subverts institutional narratives in lieu of artist-led and personal perspectives, embodies the innovative contributions to the curatorial field CCS Bard aims to recognize with this award,” said Tom Eccles, Executive Director of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.
In addition to Gaweewong, CCS Bard recognizes curator and educator Amber Esseiva (Class of ‘15) with the 2025 CCS Bard Alumni Award. As Acting Senior Curator at the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University (ICA at VCU) and former Curator-at-Large at The Studio Museum in Harlem, Esseiva develops exhibitions that center emerging, mid-career, and underrecognized artists. Established in 2023, CCS Bard awards this $10,000 prize to honor outstanding graduates who demonstrate sustained innovation and engagement with exhibition-making, public education, and research in the field of curation.
Gaweewong and Esseiva will accept their awards at CCS Bard’s Spring 2025 gala celebration and dinner on April 7, 2025. The event, which is chaired by the CCS Bard Board of Governors, will be held in New York City at The Lighthouse at Pier 61.
“I’m deeply honored to receive this award and thank the esteemed committee. This milestone manifests the collaborative efforts of my family, friends, artists, mentors, and vibrant art community in Thailand, the region, and beyond,” said Gaweewong. “It inspires me to curate passionately, trusting art’s power to foster resilience and meaningful societal change."
“It brings me so much joy to receive this recognition from CCS Bard, an institution that has had such a profound impact on my work and career. It was at CCS that I first developed my passion for collaborating with artists and colleagues to produce new works of art,” said Esseiva. “To be acknowledged by so many talented alumni I admire, is both humbling and truly meaningful to me.”
About Gridthiya Gaweewong
Gridthiya Gaweewong is an independent curator and the Artistic Director of the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok whose practice addresses issues of social change experienced by artists from Thailand and beyond since the Cold War. Gaweewong also serves as a Guest Curator of the MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum in Chiang Mai. Previously, she co-founded the Thailand Biennale 2023 in Chiang Rai with Rirkrit Tiravanija, as well as the alternative art space, Project 304, with Montien Boonma, Kamol Phaosavasdi, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, which operated from 1996 through 2003.
Her curatorial projects include Imagined Borders, the 12th Gwangju Biennale (2018); Missing Links, Bangkok (2015); Between Utopia and Dystopia, Mexico City (2011); Unreal Asia, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Oberhausen (2009); Politics of Fun, Berlin (2005); and Under Construction, Tokyo (2000–2002). Gaweewong also organized the Independent Curators International (ICI) exhibition, Apichatpong Weerasethakul: The Serenity in Madness in Chiang Mai, which traveled to Manila, Hong Kong, Chicago, Oklahoma, and Taipei (2016–2020). Gaweewong is a 2018 fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership, MoMA, New York. Since 2020, she has been a member of the acquisition committee for the Singapore Art Museum. She was awarded the French Ministry of Culture’s Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2023, and currently serves as a member of the Finding Committee for Artistic Direction of Documenta 16.
Gaweewong received a Master of Arts in Administrations and Policy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in1996 after working as an English teacher and librarian in a refugee camp in Phanat Nikhom.
About Amber Esseiva
Amber Esseiva is a curator and educator specializing in producing contemporary art exhibitions and programs by national and international mid-career and emerging artists. Esseiva is currently Acting Senior Curator at the ICA at VCU and was formerly the Curator-at-Large for The Studio Museum Harlem. Previously, Esseiva organized Surface has Space at The Judd Foundation and a solo exhibition by artist Alina Tenser at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, served as Guest Curator at the 2016 Glasgow International, a biennial festival of contemporary art, and as Director at Retrospective Gallery and September Gallery in Hudson, NY.
Most recently, Esseiva curated the first contemporary art exhibition dedicated to the life and work of Amaza Lee Meredith titled Dear Mazie (September 2024–March 2025). The exhibition includes commissions by AD-WO (Emanuel Admassu and Jen Wood), The Black School (Shani Peters and Joseph Cuillier), Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Kapwani Kiwanga, Abigail Lucien, Practise (James Goggin and Shan James), Tschabalala Self, and Cauleen Smith. Esseiva has also curated solo exhibitions by Kandis Williams, Naima Green, Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Guadalupe Maravilla, and Martine Syms, among others. Other group exhibitions include Great Force (October 5, 2019–January 5, 2020) at the ICA at VCU, which featured new commissions and recent work by an intergenerational group of 24 artists, exploring how art can be used to envision new forms of race and representation freed from the bounds of historic racial constructs.
Esseiva received her M.A. in 2015 from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard). She also co-founded the interdisciplinary curatorial journal aCCeSsions and was appointed the curator of the 2014 MFA graduate thesis exhibition at Bard MFA Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. She earned a B.A. in Art History from Virginia Commonwealth University.
About Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence
Launched at CCS Bard in 1998 to recognize groundbreaking visionaries in the curatorial field, the Award for Curatorial Excellence is selected by an independent panel of leading contemporary art curators, museum directors, and artists. The award is named in recognition of patron Audrey Irmas, who bestowed the endowment for the Audrey Irmas Prize of $25,000. Irmas is an emeritus board member of CCS Bard and an active member of the Los Angeles arts and philanthropic community. The award itself is designed by artist Lawrence Weiner, and is based on his 2006 commission Bard Enter, conceived for the entrance to the Hessel Museum of Art at CCS Bard.
Past recipients of the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence include Manuel Borja-Villel (2024), Adriano Pedrosa (2023), Valerie Cassel Oliver (2022), Connie Butler (2020), Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (2019), Lia Gangitano (2018), Nicholas Serota (2017), Thelma Golden (2016), Christine Tohmé and Martha Wilson (2015), Charles Esche (2014), Elisabeth Sussman (2013), Ann Goldstein (2012), Helen Molesworth and Hans Ulrich Obrist (2011), Lucy Lippard (2010), Okwui Enwezor (2009), Catherine David (2008), Alanna Heiss (2007), Lynne Cooke and Vasif Kortun (2006), Kathy Halbreich and Mari Carmen Ramírez (2005), Walter Hopps (2004), Kynaston McShine (2003), Susanne Ghez (2002), Paul Schimmel (2001), Kasper König (2000), Marcia Tucker (1999), and Harald Szeemann (1998).
About the CCS Bard Alumni Award
The CCS Bard Alumni Award recognizes an outstanding graduate of the Center for Curatorial Studies for sustained innovation and engagement in exhibition-making, public education, research, and a commitment to the field. Launched in 2023, the Award is designed by artist Liam Gillick and the awardee is selected annually by faculty members of the program. The award is presented annually at the CCS Bard Gala in New York and the awardee will receive $10,000.
About the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College
The Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) is the leading institution dedicated to curatorial studies, a field exploring the conditions that inform contemporary exhibition-making and artistic practice. Through its Graduate Program, Library and Archives, and the Hessel Museum of Art, CCS Bard serves as an incubator for interdisciplinary practices, advances new and underrepresented perspectives in contemporary art, and cultivates a student body from diverse backgrounds in a broad effort to transform the curatorial field. CCS Bard’s dynamic and multifaceted program includes exhibitions, symposia, publications, and public events, which explore the critical potential of the practice of exhibition-making.
This event was last updated on 12-16-2024
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