Biography
Isabelle Burrows is a doctoral student in the Cultural Studies Program at Queen’s University and a research fellow with the North American Cultural Diplomacy Initiative (NACDI). She completed her BA in Humanities at Simon Fraser University and her MA in Art History at Concordia University. Isabelle’s MA research presents a feminist critique of Tate Modern and Deutsche Bank’s collaborative retrospective of Turkish modernist Fahrelnissa Zeid. Like many collaborations between private wealth and influential mega-museums, this exhibition exploited a so-called “global” artist to fulfil political and financial goals for the host institutions. Isabelle’s ongoing research expands on these issues and examines digital museum diplomacy through public-facing marketing, popular scholarship, and exhibition publicity, alongside internal institutional reports and artists’ histories. In doing so, she considers how private institutions leverage philanthropy in the arts to intervene in markets, advance political agendas, and deflect public attention away from the gentrification, colonialism, and environmental exploitation underpinning the accumulation of capital.