Neville Wakefield is a modern curator interested in exploring the ways in which art behaves outside of institutional contexts. It is his belief that where art is most successful – it’s most epiphanic and challenging – is not within the white spaces and clean-cut definitions that have traditionally encased it. Rather it is to be found in new territories; hybrid spaces that break free of containment to suggest new paradigms. An early example of his pushing art into exciting and provocative intersections was in 1994 with the seminal Fashion: Photography of the Nineties, the first of many books to map and narrate the border wars between fashion and art. For over a decade he has done something similar for Supreme orchestrating and curating an ongoing series of art collaborations that have ignited the fusion between high art and street fashion.
As founder and artistic director of site-specific shows such as Elevation1049 and Desert X, he brings art into direct contact with the social, environmental and economic landscapes of the Southern California desert and Swiss Alps. Collaborations with Cartier, Nike, Playboy and others force art to mix with other kinds of commerce, to break its pledge of allegiance to a rarefied insider world of private safe-houses and public institutions. Context itself therefore becomes the final creative act. As curator, Neville’s boundary breaking role is not just to create and encourage new conditions under which art can flourish but to make it accessible to wider audiences in new and exciting ways.