Curating Engagement: Book Launch and Conversation, Moderated by Co-Editors Abigail Satinsky and Aaron Levy

Join us in celebrating the publication of Curating Engagement. Co-editors Abby Satinsky and Aaron Levy will moderate a panel exploring the book's themes and the evolving role of engagement in contemporary curatorial practice. The discussion will be followed by a reception on the terrace.

6:00–7:00 pm, Panel, Sert Gallery, Level 3
7:00–8:00 pm, Reception, Level 3 + Terrace

Free and open to the public.

Wagner Foundation and Public Trust present the Curating Engagement, a new publication, available as a free pdf and printed book, addressing the evolving role of curatorial practice at the intersection of public life, institutional responsibility, and community collaboration. Bringing together more than forty curators, artists, and educators, the publication reflects on how cultural practitioners are rethinking engagement amid shifting social, political, and economic conditions.  

Edited by Aaron Levy (Executive and Artistic Director, Public Trust), Abigail Satinsky (Senior Program Officer and Curator for Art & Culture, Wagner Foundation), and Daniel Tucker (Curator-in-Residence, Public Trust), the book emerges from a national field-building retreat hosted at Public Trust in Philadelphia in June 2025. The gathering brought together practitioners working across museums, independent spaces, academia, and community based initiatives to examine what it means to work with and be accountable to the public today. The publication captures this exchange through dialogues, essays, and case studies that foreground collaboration, experimentation, and long term relationship building as central to curatorial practice. 

Abigail Satinsky is a Program Officer at the Wagner Foundation, where she manages the foundation’s arts and culture partnerships and curates exhibitions and public programs for the Wagner Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her work focuses on supporting artists, arts organizations, and museums in realizing ambitious and community-centered projects.

Before joining Wagner, Abigail worked with artist-run spaces and collaborative arts initiatives in Chicago, including InCUBATE, Threewalls, and ACRE. She co-founded Sunday Soup, an international micro-granting network, as well as Hand in Glove, a national conference on artist-run culture that later evolved into Common Field. As curator and Head of Public Engagement at Tufts University Art Galleries, she organized exhibitions and public programs with numerous artists and founded the Collective Futures Fund, which supports artist-run projects in Greater Boston. Abigail’s writing and curatorial practice focus on artist-run culture, socially engaged art, and the role of artists in advancing social change.

Aaron Levy, PhD, MPhil, is a curator and scholar whose work explores the intersections of visual culture, medicine, and social practice. He serves as Executive and Artistic Director of Public Trust, a Philadelphia non-profit in residence on the University of Pennsylvania campus for nearly twenty-five years, dedicated to art's capacity to address urgent political questions and foster social change. At Penn, where he has taught across multiple schools and departments since 2002, he is a Senior Lecturer in English and the History of Art as well as Director of Health Humanities Initiatives at Penn Medicine. He has organized major exhibitions and public programs nationally and internationally, including at the Barnes Foundation, National Constitution Center, New Museum, International Peace Institute, and Venice Biennale. His publications include Cities Without Citizens (2004), Helene Cixous: Ex-Cities (2006), Four Conversations on the Architecture of Discourse (2010), Evasions of Power (2011), and Rx/Museum: 52 Essays on Art and Reflection in Medicine (2022). 

Ruth Erickson is Barbara Lee Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston. A curator and scholar of contemporary art, she is deeply committed to facilitating artists and institutions working together to create meaningful exhibitions, books, and programs that promote justice and inspire curiosity in the world. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Pennsylvania and was the recipient of a prestigious Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellowship in 2022. 

Dr. Audrey N. Lopez is a curator, researcher, and writer based in Providence, RI working at the intersection of public art and civic engagement. She is Director & Curator of Public Art at The Greenway in Boston, MA. Grounded in participatory approaches, Lopez’s curatorial practice works to strengthen communities’ relationships to public land, urban ecologies, and each other through art that inspires sustained civic engagement. Her work has been featured in Artforum, ARTnews, ArchDaily, designboom, The Los Angeles Times, KCRW, The Boston Globe, WBUR, and Boston Art Review. Lopez earned her PhD from the University of California Santa Barbara (USCB) and has taught courses at UCSB, Santa Barbara City College, and the Rhode Island School of Design.