Since 2009, Patrice Giasson has been the Alex Gordon Curator of Art of the Americas at the Neuberger Museum of Art, specializing in modern and contemporary art. Giasson also contributes to the undergraduate and graduate programs of the Department of Art History at SUNY Purchase College, where he offers the following courses: Latin American Art in the Age of Globalization; Mexican Art from the Revolution to the NAFTA Era; Pre-Columbian Aesthetics in Modern and Contemporary Art; Introduction to Museum Studies; and Exhibition Seminar.
Giasson was trained in art history and comparative literature, with a particular focus on modern and contemporary Latin American art and literature. Giasson studied in Quebec (PhD, Université de Montréal), Mexico (Master’s in Mesoamerican Studies, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), and France, where he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre de Recherches sur les Arts et le Langage at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS-PARIS).
As a curator, Giasson is interested in a variety of themes including social resistance and environmental struggles in the arts, the place of history and mythology in modern society, the impact of globalization on local contexts, and the function of humor in art and literature. Most recently, he has developed exhibitions exploring biomimicry and machine learning algorithms. Giasson has also explored Pre-Colombian art and ancient writing systems and has worked in indigenous communities in Mexico.
Giasson has drawn attention to emerging and underrepresented artists from across the Americas—including Engels the Artist (Haiti), Nicolás de Jesús (México), Rosalie D. Gagné (Québec), Luis Perelman (USA), and Ana de Orbegoso (Peru)—and has presented major exhibitions on leading artists, including Leandro Erlich (Argentina), Ignacio Iturria (Uruguay), Alfredo Jaar (Chile), Alex Katz (USA), Teresa Margolles (Mexico), and Pier Paolo Pasolini (Italy).