Jim Drobnick

Jim Drobnick is a critic, curator and Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory at OCAD University, Toronto. He has published on the visual arts, performance, the senses, artists' multiples, and post-media practices.

Education
PhD, Concordia University (2006)
MFA, NSCAD University (1986)
BA, Oberlin College (1981)

He co-founded the Journal of Curatorial Studies with Jennifer Fisher (York University). The Journal is an international, peer-reviewed publication that explores the increasing relevance of curating and exhibitions and their impact on institutions, audiences, aesthetics and display culture. Inviting perspectives from visual studies, art history, critical theory, cultural studies and other academic fields, the journal welcomes a diversity of disciplinary approaches on curating and exhibitions broadly defined. By catalyzing debate and serving as a venue for the emerging discipline of curatorial studies, the Journal encourages the development of the theory, practice and history of curating, as well as the analysis of exhibitions and display culture in general. In 2025, the Journal was selected by an international jury to be one of the inaugural medalists for the Art Basel Awards in recognition of its influence in defining the direction of contemporary art, advancing critical discourse, and elevating underrepresented voices. Drobnick is also an editor at The Senses and Society, an interdisciplinary journal investigating the senses in culture, art and society. Other journals he has edited include Parachute and Public. Special thematic issues of the Journal of Curatorial Studies:
-- JCS 3.2-3: Latin America
-- JCS 4.1: China
-- JCS 4.3: Museums and Affect
-- JCS 5.1: Affect & Relationality
-- JCS 5.3: Cultural Diplomacy
-- JCS 6.2: Paradigms and Pedagogy
-- JCS 7.2: Living Display
-- JCS 8.1: Living Display II
-- JCS 8.2: Restaging Exhibitions
-- JCS 9.1: Venice Biennale
-- JCS 9.2: Curating the Sea
-- JCS 10.2: Social Justice
-- JCS 11.1: Online Exhibitions
-- JCS 12.2: Radical Pedagogy
-- JCS 14.1: Intervention
-- JCS 15.2: Research Creation (upcoming)
-- JCS 16.1: AI (upcoming)

Drobnick's curatorial collaborative, DisplayCult, co-founded with Jennifer Fisher, organizes art exhibitions that foreground performative and multisensory projects. See www.displaycult.com and @archivesbyartists

Selected exhibitions:

2026 Portraits as Portals: Psychic Mediums Read Unknown Artists, intervention into the collection of paintings at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, October. Professional psychics were invited to read portraits by currently unknown artists in order to reconstitute the painters’ lost identities and histories.

2025 Archives by Artists, Galerie d’art UQO, Gatineau, QC. The exhibition presented a diverse range of strategies used by artists’ multiples to explore, critique and imaginatively reconceive the archive.

2024 Artists’ Tarot and the Archive, Archives of Ontario, Toronto. The decks in this show drew images and materials from archives, used Tarot as a platform to create a new archive, highlighted Tarot-based skills and intuition that are also exercised by archival researchers, and mobilized the archive itself as an oracular device.

2024 Portraits as Portals: Psychic Mediums Read an Unknown Artist, intervention into the collection of paintings at the Archives of Ontario, Toronto. Professional psychics were invited to read portraits by currently unknown artists in order to reconstitute the painters’ lost identities and histories.

2024 Portraits as Portals: Psychic Mediums Read Unknown Artists, intervention into the collection of Art Windsor-Essex, Windsor. Professional psychics were invited to read 7 portraits by currently unknown artists in order to reconstitute the painters’ lost histories.

2023 Portraits as Portals: Psychic Mediums Read Paintings by Unknown Artists, intervention into the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, SPG Gallery, York University, Toronto. Professional psychics were invited to read seven portraits by currently unknown artists in order to reconstitute the painters’ lost histories.

2023 Archives by Artists, Archives of Ontario, Toronto. Presented a diverse range of strategies used by artists’ multiples to explore, critique and imaginatively reconceive the archive.

2022 Portraits as Portals, intervention into the collection of paintings at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston. Professional psychics were invited to read portraits by currently unknown artists in order to reconstitute the painters’ lost histories.

2018 PREZENCE: Card Works by James Prez, Art Metropole, Toronto. Monographic show of unbound and card-based works.

2009 NIGHTSENSE, Nuit Blanche: Zone B, fifteen sites in the Financial District, Toronto. Featured commissioned, site-specific artworks that amplified the senses in the shadowy world of the financial district after dark. The works also critiqued the recent financial crisis and posed an alternative sensory economy.

2009 MetroSonics, National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives, Ottawa. Audioworks and sound artifacts from the Art Metropole archive and NGC collection that traces audio art’s transition from a peripheral activity to an undisputed mainstay of the contemporary art world.

2008 Odor Limits, Esther M. Klein Art Gallery, Monell Science Center, Philadelphia. Artworks that demonstrate how scent can prompt thought-provoking insights into cultural differences, environmentalism, personal identity, spirituality and the philosophy of the body.

2007 Listening Awry, McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton, ON. Videos and installations that embody sound’s potential to disrupt conventions of listening and cultural sensibility.

2005 Aural Cultures, Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff. This exhibition explored the intersection of sound and culture and how audioworks could interrogate the politics of harmony, orchestrate asocial bodily and environmental noises, and construct alternative sound communities.

2003 reminiSCENT, performance series in association with FADO, co-curated with Paul Couillard, Toronto. These projects focused on scent as a cultural practice and a physical activity. In particular, the works investigated how smell performs as a vehicle for personal, social and historical memories.

2001 Museopathy, Agnes Etherington Art Centre and ten local history museums and heritage sites, Kingston. A multi-site exhibition in museums and heritage sites throughout Kingston. Artists were commissioned to install works in museums reflecting military, political, marine, and corrections histories, as well as venues dedicated to geology, health care, and ice hockey.

2000 Vital Signs, Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Montreal. Explored how the non-visual senses are interrogated and reconceived in contemporary artistic practice.

1998 CounterPoses: Reimagining Tableaux Vivants, Galerie Oboro, Montreal. An exhibition-event featuring twelve projects by artists from Québec, Canada and the United States who re-imagined and updated the genre of tableaux vivants and incorporated living persons in elaborate, site-specific installations.

Selected publications:

2025 Archives, Multiples and the Research Collection, entretiens #7, Gatineau: Galerie UQO (in English and French), 44 pp.

2024 "Inspired Experiments: Olfactory Art and Practice-Based Research," in Odor: Immaterial Sculpture, Siegen: Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, pp. 176-189 (in English and German).

2023 "Rutherford Chang: The Record Collector as Artist-Curator," Revue musicale OICRM, 10.1, https://revuemusicaleoicrm.org/rmo-vol10-n1/rutherford-chang/, pp. 16-35.

2021 "Olfactivism: Scents in the City and Beyond," in Olfactory Art and the Political in the Age of Resistance, Gwenn-Ael Lynn and Debra Riley Parr, eds., London and New York: Bloomsbury, 76-98.

2018 ”Bottles of Art, Works of Alcohol,” Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies, 18(4), 54-70.

”Smell, Terrorism and Performance,” Performance Research, 23(4-5), 350-356.

”Shuffling the Collection: Card Decks as Museum Interventions,” Muséologies: les cahiers d’études supérieures, 9(2), 169-196 (co-author).

2017 ”Inebriationism: Alcohol, Performance, Paradox,” Performance Research, 22(6): Under the Influence, 26-42.

”Intoxicating Scenes: Alcohol and Art in the Museum,” in Food and Museums, Nina Levent and Irina D. Mihalache, eds., Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 295-313.

2016 ”Germaine Koh: Post-Performativity and Incidental Aesthetics,” in Johanna Householder and Tanya Mars, eds., Caught in the Act, Vol. 2: Performance by Canadian Women, Toronto: YYZ Books, 270-281.

“Installation Art: The Predicament of the Senses,” catalogue essay for Installations: À la Croisée des Chemins/Installations: At the Crossroads, curated by Bernard Lamarche, Quebec City: Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (English and French), 128-138, 196-205.

2015 ”Smell: The Hybrid Art,” in L’Art Olfactif Contemporain, ed. Chantal Jaquet, Paris: Université Sorbonne, 173-189.

“Hadley+Maxwell: Backstage in the Phantasmagoria,” in are you experienced?, Melissa Bennett, ed., Hamilton: Art Gallery of Hamilton and London: Black Dog Publishing, 24-37 (co-author).

”Curating the City: Collectioneering and the Affects of Display,” in Celina Jeffery, ed., The Artist as Curator, Bristol: Intellect, 151-175 (co-author).

2014 ”The Museum as Smellscape,” in The Multisensory Museum: A Cross-disciplinary Perspective on Multiple Modalities of a Museum Experience, Nina Levent and Alvaro Pascual-Leone, eds., Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 177-196.

“Mock Excursions and Twisted Itineraries: Tour Guide Performances,” in Chantal Pontbriand, ed., Parachute: The Anthology, Vol. II: Performance and Performativity, Zurich: JRP Ringier, 110-121.

2013 ”To ‘Feel Breathing’: Duchamp and the Immaterial Aesthetics of Scent,” in Sascha Bru, David Ayers, Benedikt Hjartarson and Anne Reverseau, eds., European Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies, Volume 3: The Aesthetics of Matter. Modernism, the Avant-Garde and Material Exchange, Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter, 275-289.

2011 ”The City, Distilled,” in Senses and the City, edited by Madalina Diaconu, Eva Heuberger, Ruth Mateus-Berr, and Lukas Marcel Vosicky, Berlin/Vienna: Lit Verlag, 257-275.

2010 ”Airchitecture: Guarded Breaths and the [cough] Art of Ventilation,” in Art History and the Senses: 1830 to the Present, Patrizia di Bello and Gabriel Koureas, eds., London: Ashgate, 147-166.

2009 “Sense and reminiSCENT: Performance and the Essences of Memory,” Canadian Theatre Review 137, Winter, 6-12.

”Body Events and Implicated Gazes,” Performance Research, 13(4), 64-74.

2008 “Simon Starling: The Entangled Life of Things,” Switch 1: 1, Winter, 4-5.

“Sonic Intimidation: Santiago Sierra’s El Degüello,” One Hour Empire, Fall, 72-76.

“Odor Limits,” The Senses & Society 3(3), 349-358 (co-author).

“HEXhibitionism,” in FASTWÜRMS: Donky@Ninja@Witch, Vancouver: Contemporary Art Gallery (co-author), 27-42.

2007 “Bodies of Interference,” in Carolee Schneemann: Split Decision, Toronto/Buffalo: Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art/CEPA Gallery, 26-31.

“Sometimes It’s Good to Put Up a Couple of Walls: Rirkrit Tiravanija,” Sketch, Spring, 8-11.

2006 The Smell Culture Reader, editor, Oxford & New York: Berg, 442 pp.

”Deborah Hay: A Performance Primer,” Performance Research, 11(2), 43-57.

”Fear, Shame, Ecstasy and Self-Transformation: Marina Abramovic,” in Technologies of Intuition, ed. Jennifer Fisher, Toronto & Winnipeg: YYZ Books & MAWA (co-author), 141-153.

“From Anechoic Cave to Sonic Chasm,” in Su-Mei Tse, Chicago & Luxembourg: The Renaissance Society & Editions Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art contemporain, 89-112 (in English and French).

2005 “Jayce Salloum: Archive of the Street,” in Image, Index and Inscription: Essays on Contemporary Canadian Photography, ed. Robert Bean, Toronto: Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography and YYZ Books (co-author), 167-179.

2004 Aural Cultures, editor of anthology and CD, Toronto & Banff: YYZ Books & Walter Phillips Gallery Editions, 288 pp.

“Platefuls of Air,” Public #30: Eating Things, Scott McFarlane, ed., 175-193.

“Volatile Effects: Olfactory Dimensions in Art and Architecture,” in Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader, ed. David Howes, Oxford & New York: Berg, 265-280.

2003 ”Trafficking in Air,” Performance Research, special issue “On Smell,” 8(3), Fall, 29-43.

2002 ”Toposmia: Art, Scent, and Interrogations of Spatiality,” Angelaki 7(1), Gary Banham, ed., April, 31-46.

”Volatile Architectures,” in Crime and Ornament: In the Shadow of Adolf Loos, Bernie Miller and Melony Ward, eds., Toronto: YYZ Books, 263-282.

2001 “Ambient Communities and Association Complexes: Aernout Mik’s Awry Socialities,” Parachute #101, Winter (co-author), 91-98.

2000 *”Inhaling Passions: Art, Sex and Scent,” Sexuality and Culture, 4(3), Summer, 37-56.

1999 ”Recipes for the Cube: The Aromatic and Edible in Art,” in Foodculture: Tasting Identities and Geographies in Art, Barbara Fischer, ed., Toronto: YYZ Books, 69-79.