Photo Credit: Eva Pensis

Dr. Gervais Marsh is a writer, curator and scholar based in New York City, whose practice meditates on questions of relation, intimacy, and the limits of reconciliation. Guided by a desire to foster emotional resonances through texts, exhibition making, public art and programming, they seek to ignite ongoing reflection rather than definitive answers. They think alongside artists across all mediums, nurturing an interweaving of texts from expansive areas of thought. With a commitment to citation influenced by Black Feminisms, they believe that knowledge is created collectively, and lean into the vulnerability of uncertainty, recognizing that not everything can be known. Affirming modes of meaning making that circumvent the grips of racial capitalism, they prioritize listening, introspection and thoughtful dialogue as critical to intentional study.

They received a PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, and their dissertation research considered the generative possibilities to envision Black subjectivity that emerges in an engagement of difficult racial and sexual intimacies, that is, forms of relation that are structured through histories and experiences of racial and sexual violence. They are the Artist Research Manager on the curatorial team at Creative Time, where they manage the Research & Develop Fellowship, support artist commissions and the Creative Time Summit. They were a recent Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow with the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and co-curated the exhibition Not Everything is Given . Other recent exhibitions include Contours of the Interior at VisArts Center, To be pained is to have lived through feeling with Canada NYC and Rupture: Interventions of Possibility.

Marsh's writing has been published widely in artist monographs, exhibition catalogs and arts journals, including Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Denzil Hurley (monograph), The Financial Times, Hyperallergic, C Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and ARTS.BLACK, among others. They teach undergraduate/graduate courses at the intersections of Black Feminist Theory, Praxis and Performance, Black Queer Studies, Caribbean Studies and Visual Culture. They grew up in Kingston, Jamaica, a home that shapes their understanding of self and relationship to the world.

They have received writing fellowships and curatorial support from the Modern Ancient Brown Foundation, Jamaica Art Society, Terra Foundation for American Art, The Gay and Lesbian Review, and Independent Curators International, and were an editor with Ruckus Journal for two years.