About Aaron

Aaron Beebe is a Brooklyn based artist, curator, and strategic planning consultant. Moving between installation-based practice and works on canvas and paper, his studio practice explores institutional cultures of display, colonial power, memory, nostalgia and sentiment through a focus on historic documents and the aesthetics of archival material. As the director of a small museum (for ten years, Aaron was the director of the Coney Island Museum in Coney Island, NY), he championed historic preservation initiatives, historically-motivated public works, and exhibits that stretched the boundaries between fiction and document. His curation and his artwork reflect his career in archives, restoration studios and museums, with his use of text, his carefully crafted frames, and the often surprising windows and vitrines embedded into the surfaces of his paintings. Much of his work uses typographic and cartographic elements and framing and binding techniques that play with the conventions and boundaries of the painting, the artists’ book, and the curatorial label.

In his studio practice as well as his work creating archives and museums as art, he uses text and image to create stories in an indirect and evasive fashion that evokes rather than explains – engaging a method of scholarship that obscures as much as it defines and celebrates curiosity more than it embraces certainty. He is a cofounder of the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn, the creative force behind the Congress of Curious Peoples, and a participant in numerous symposia, lecture series, and roundtable discussions about dime museums, curiosity, public space, and the development of cultural institutions in New York. His drawings and paintings have been shown in galleries in New York, Philadelphia, and Santa Fe, and his installations have been awarded grants from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts and the Dedalus Foundation among others. He has been an artist in residence at Last Ship in Mumbai and Jiwar in Barcelona, his essays can be found in numerous publications, and his visual artwork can be found in several private collections.

Aaron lives and works in Brooklyn, and he travels regularly to Mumbai with his wife and partner, an anthropologist of media.

Click here for Aaron’s CV