Wayne Modest

Wayne Modest is Director of Content at the Wereldmuseum in the Netherlands. He is also professor 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.

He is currently working on several publications including Decolonizing the Museum: Art, Activism, and the Question of Race in Curation (forthcoming with Chiara de Cesari and Marta Pagliuca Pelacani) and 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 was part of the curatorial team of the Kingston Biennial (2022): Pressure (together with David Scott and Nicole Smythe-Johnshon).

Modest is currently working on a research, teaching, and exhibition project Sovereignty of the Imagination: Art of the Question of Freedom and the exhibition project Women, Life, Freedoms: Women and Global Modernism/s (together with Ming Tiampo). Modest’s work is driven by a commitment to collaboration.