Art is manifest thought. Rarely is thought pure. More rarely still is it conceived, as it is so often shown, in a vacuum. It lives first in encounter before living on in the minds and conversations that follow. Where it is most successful - where it is epiphanic, provocative and challenging – is not within the white spaces and clean-cut definitions that have come so often to encase it. Rather it is in those spaces where experience breaks free of its containment to create new paradigms. Making a virtue of this impurity is the job of the curator. Sometimes it is my job.
“Neville is able to tap, conjure, feed off the truth of the unconscious rather than peddle the dumb and dour of dim reality. Unlike most curators he actually hangs out with artists. In fact I’ve always treated him as another artist.”
- Richard Prince NYT
“The writer Neville Wakefield is one of the best curators around – his sure-handed visual sense often rivals that of the artists he’s working with.”
- The New Yorker