McLean-Ferris To Assume the Role through 2022, Expanding our Mission To Platform Woman-identified Critics and Artists

The Topical Cream Editor-in-Residence program was developed in response to the urgent need for institutional support for criticism and experimental journalism as the pandemic shifted priorities within many publications and art organizations. Nominations for the residency were solicited from Topical Cream’s Board of Directors and advisors.

“Criticism and writing are essential elements of our artistic ecosystem; they are sites of response, exchange, and thought vital to the flourishing of art, in which I have personally found meaning and inspiration. I’m delighted to be working with Topical Cream—an organization that is committed to supporting women-identifying and gender-non-conforming artists and writers through publishing their work and ideas—as Editor-in-Residence for 2022. I want to use this time to encourage experimental forms of criticism, radical voices, and avant-garde practices, commissioning writing that thinks deeply through and with the work of artists,” stated McLean-Ferris, critic and 2022 Topical Cream Editor-in-Residence.

“As the world continues to recover from COVID-19, we are thrilled to bring Laura McLean-Ferris’s humanistic vision of supporting the work and legacies of women and gender non-conforming artists to the Topical Cream Editor-in-Residence program in 2022,” said Topical Cream Founder and Director Lyndsy Welgos. 

Laura McLean-Ferris is a writer and curator based in Turin, Italy, and New York, USA. She is curator at large at Swiss Institute, New York, where until recently she held the post of chief curator. At SI she has curated numerous projects with artists including Olga Balema, Aria Dean, Irena Haiduk, Nancy Lupo, Sandra Mujinga, Jill Mulleady, Shahryar Nashat, Rosemary Mayer, Cally Spooner, and Studio for Propositional Cinema. She is a regular contributor to Artforum, ArtReview, art-agenda, Cura, frieze, Mousse, and Flash Art International, and has authored catalogue essays on the work of Harold Ancart, Nina Beier, Anna-Sophie Berger, Deimantas Narkevičius, Shahryar Nashat, Rachel Rose, and Hayley Tompkins, among others. She was the recipient of the 2015 Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, and her short-form collection The Lacustrine was published in 2016.