Wayne Modest

Wayne Modest is Director of Content at the Wereldmuseum in the Netherlands. He is also professor by special appointment of Material Culture and Critical Heritage Studies at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. A cultural studies scholar by training, Modest works at the intersection of material culture, memory, and heritage studies, with a strong focus on colonialism and its afterlives in Europe and the Caribbean.

Committed to collaborative practice, Modest is currently working on several research, curatorial and publication projects. These include the publications Decolonizing the Museum: Art, Activism, and the Question of Race in Curation (forthcoming with Chiara de Cesari and Marta Pagliuca Pelacani), Museum Temporalities: Time, History and the Future of the Ethnographic Museum (forthcoming with Peter Pels) and Beyond Boundaries: Seeing Art History from the Caribbean, together with Anna Arabindad-Kesson.

His most recent curatorial projects include him being part of the curatorial team of the Kingston Biennial (2022): Pressure (together with David Scott and Nicole Smythe-Johnshon). He is currently working on the research, teaching, and exhibition projects Sovereignty of the Imagination: Art of the Question of Freedom and  Women, Life, Freedoms: Women and Global Modernism/s (together with Ming Tiampo).