Brian Sholis

Brian Sholis

Writer, editor, consultant in Toronto, He/him

About

I work with design offices, arts organizations, and creative companies on narrative strategy, editing, and copywriting. I’m also a meticulous and empathetic project manager responsible for guiding teams through complex projects.

Obsessed with NBA basketball, editorial design and typography, baking with tea as a key ingredient, exploring the city by bike, minor literary forms, and learning how to be a better father to my two young sons.

Work Experience

2023 — Now
Toronto

I am the co-founder of Valise, software that gives artists peace of mind by letting them easily store, sort, and share information about their artworks.

2022 — 2024
2016 — 2018
Executive Director at Gallery TPW
Toronto
2004 — 2009

Projects

Ongoing

In January 2023 I launched Frontier Magazine, a weekly newsletter offering appreciations of new and newly relevant ideas in the arts, the built environment, and technology. It features essays, interviews, link round-ups, and more.

Cover images by Frontier associate creative director Tristan Marantos.

2023

An audio accompaniment to the weekly Frontier Magazine newsletter, this podcast was an eight-episode season of weekly conversations with artists, writers, startup founders, and creative people on the ideas and ideals that inspire their work.

2022

Live Magazine has a unique concept: for each issue, Frontier assembles a team of editors, writers, photographers, and illustrators to give readers insight into an event’s most powerful ideas and conversations. This issue responds to and expands upon the Bentway’s Street Summit, a weekend-long conference about streets, cities, and public space.

In four weeks’ time (April–May 2022), I conceived and edited the entire issue, which mixed interviews and stories with an op-ed, a photo portfolio, short films, and more. My colleagues at Frontier commissioned illustrators and photographers to round out the project, which is presented as a website. They also created several on-site activations from which we gathered materials for the magazine.

2022

A massive project that entailed not only editing but also a significant amount of project management done in concert with a small group on the ground in Ohio, curators based there and elsewhere, and separate design teams in Amsterdam and Berlin.

I edited, fact-checked, copy edited, and proofread all the texts presented in the 150-page triennial guidebook and the 272-page catalogue, as well as the wall labels at every venue. I built and maintained the triennial-wide master checklist, confirming every artwork and courtesy-line detail with the artists and/or their galleries, and created a database of images and captions to be shared with members of the media, whose inquiries I helped field. I served as a creative sounding board for the Krishnamurthy and his artistic team and even art directed installation-view photo shoots.

2021

I spent eighteen months, from before its Summer 2020 launch through the completion of its first large, multidisciplinary projects, consulting weekly with founder Andrea Andersson. These sessions centered on operational strategy, board composition, fundraising and grant-writing, creative and social-media strategy, publication editing, and copywriting.

2021

Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Art hired me as both editor and project manager for the first exhibition catalogue published since its move to expanded quarters in 2018. I worked directly with the curators, participating artists, and Bløk, the book’s designers, on all aspects of the project, from helping answer structural questions and image sourcing to recommending an Inuktitut typeface and proofreading the back matter.

2021

I collaborated on the narrative brand strategy for Wellfield, Canada’s first public company dedicated to decentralized finance. This involved developing the tone of voice and stories for three interconnected brands: Wellfield, the parent company; Seamless, a cross-blockchain trading solution; and MoneyClip, a consumer-facing app for accessing decentralized finance platforms.

2018

On an ongoing basis, the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation accepts proposals for commissioned texts. In 2018 I consulted with the Foundation to develop the strategy for and structure of this commissioning system, focusing in particular on finding writers previously unaffiliated with Gonzalez-Torres’s work, then spearheaded the program for three years.

Writing

2019

This book, published by the Clark Art Institute and distributed by Yale University Press, surveys a unique archive of ephemera from one of the art world’s splashiest events. I wrote the lead essay in the catalogue, which also features a contribution from Clark Librarian Susan Roeper, who buit the collection, and an essay I commissioned from librarian Sarah Hamerman.

2016

This book is the catalogue that accompanied my 2016–17 exhibition of the same name at the Cincinnati Art Museum. It grew out of an idea I first had in 2011 to understand the links between remarkable artists in Kentucky’s capital city. I was pleased when John Jeremiah Sullivan, who has written eloquently about other Kentucky subjects, agreed to contribute. The book was co-published by the Cincinnati Art Museum and Yale University Press.

Exhibitions

2019
Williamstown, MA

I guest-curated this exhibition drawn from the museum’s extensive and unique holdings of ephemera from the Venice Biennale. Art’s Biggest Stage showcases this growing archive and explores the questions of identity, nationhood, and spectacle central to the Biennale. Accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

2016
Cincinnati, OH

This exhibition, presented at the Cincinnati Art Museum as part of the 2016 FotoFocus Biennial, provided the most complete and absorbing account to date of the Lexington Camera Club.

This under-studied group of artists included Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Van Deren Coke, Robert C. May, James Baker Hall, and Cranston Ritchie, among others. These and other members of the Lexington Camera Club explored the craft and expressive potential of photography.

The exhibition was supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Warhol Foundation, and other organizations and was accompanied by a catalogue co-published with Yale University Press.

Side Projects

2020

A flexible, easy-to-use, and cloud-based studio-inventory database for artists and collectors. Built on Airtable, you can likely run it at no cost.

2004
Why We Should Talk About Cady Noland

Fanzine about artist Cady Noland that I distributed at a gallery opening in New York in January 2004 and his since made its way into libraries and private collections around the world.

Volunteering

2013 — Now
Contributing Editor at Aperture Foundation
New York
2015 — 2017
Finance and Audit Committee Member at Association of Art Museum Curators
New York
1994 — 1998
Volunteer at the punk-rock/hardcore/screamo scene
Chicago

Wrote fanzines, worked at Basement Children zine distro, put on shows in basements and church rec halls, co-organized the 1997 Chicagofest hardcore music festival.

Contact

Twitter
Are.na