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Hesse
McGraw is a curator, writer and artist working as curator at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska.
He was the founding director and curator of Paragraph,
a contemporary art gallery operating under the non-profit Urban
Culture Project in downtown Kansas City, Missouri. He is the
former assistant director of Max Protetch gallery in New York, City and former senior editor of Review, a Kansas City-based visual culture
magazine. He has served as a lecturer in the Interdisciplinary
department of the Kansas City Art Institute and frequently serves
as a guest lecturer, critic and juror for fine art and architecture schools and organizations throughout the US.
Alongside producing two dozens exhibits and projects over three
years at Paragraph, he has curated exhibitions for FLEX Self Storage
(Topeka, Kansas), The New Genres Festival (Tulsa), The Stray Show
(Chicago), Guild and Greyshkul (NYC), -scopeMiami, RARE (NYC),
Rocket gallery (London) and White Flag Projects (St. Louis).
He regularly contributes to publications including Art Papers, Dots & Quotes, Empty magazine, The
Kansas City Star, RES, Review, Tank, Ten by Ten. He has written exhibition essays for artists including Ryoji Ikeda, Tobias Wong, Steve Mumford, Eric von Robertson and many others.
His artwork incorporates photography, video, sound and text
into site-specific installations and published works. The work experientially
engages cultural information systems to amplify loaded micro-histories with the intent to create new networks of meaning. The work
aims to construct democratic viewing scenarios that offer viewers a bit
of personal space within the context of the general world. His work has been shown in venues internationally and in
a solo exhibition at RARE, NYC.