The Glasgow School of Art (GSA) and Jerwood Foundation are delighted to announce that the inaugural Jerwood Curatorial Fellowship 2025 recipients are Zoë Zo, Zoë Tumika & Zoë Guthrie and Żżo Charlery. As a collaborative duo, they will seek to frame the GSA Archives & Collections and Jerwood Collection into view with Black spatial practices, performance, and material thinking. They will undertake this joint collaborative fellowship with shared authorship and responsibility for research, curation, production and public engagement.
A significant recognition of the GSA’s Exhibitions programme, the fellowship is an ambitious two-year initiative which seeks to foster diverse voices by offering emerging curators in Scotland their first supported exhibition in an institutional setting. The Fellowship offers a period of research and access to a production budget to develop and stage a public exhibition with an event at The Reid Gallery, The Glasgow School of Art, which will run 14 March – 25 April 2026.
For this year’s fellowship, the selection panel was Sophia Yadong Hao (Director & Principal Curator, Cooper Gallery, Reader in Curatorial Practice, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee); Omar Kholeif, author, curator, broadcaster, and museum director recently appointed: Professor of Global Art Theory and Practice at GSA and Programme Lead for MLitt Curatorial Practice; Stella Hook (Engagement Lead, GSA Archives & Collections); and Jenny Brownrigg, GSA Exhibitions Director, Reader (Research) in Curating.
For the fellowship, Zoë Zo, Zoë Tumika & Zoë Guthrie and Żżo Charlery will fold the Jerwood Collection and the GSA Archives & Collections into a dialectically material conversation, staging Glasgow as the centre from which to perceive the scale and afterlives of the global colonial project, and the precise, opaque, continuously emergent ways Black life subsits and composes. They will undertake steep engagement with visual material and inter-textual analysis to investigate and ‘critically fabulate’ (Saidiya Hartman, 2008) lives at the edges from the centre of pre/post-industrial Glasgow, departing from the River Clyde—its metaphorical, ideological, and industrial force—and the architectures that surround and reflect it.
The recipients said: “We are delighted to be awarded the Jerwood Curatorial Fellowship at GSA. It gives us the tangible resourcing, institutional space, and access to networks historically unavailable to us. This fellowship will provide the platform we are ready for: mentorship and production support from GSA Exhibitions; visibility through the Reid Gallery; and the next step in our curatorial practice.”
Jenny Brownrigg, GSA Exhibitions Director, said, “The Jerwood Curatorial Fellowship at GSA is a key award in our programme, providing a significant opportunity for emerging curators in Scotland. We are delighted that Zoë Zo, Zoë Tumika & Zoë Guthrie, and Żżo Charlery are a collaborative first recipient and look forward to supporting them as they engage with two significant collections.”
The GSA Archives and Collections are delighted to be working with the Jerwood Curatorial Fellowship 2025 recipients, Zoë Zo, Zoë Tumika & Zoë Guthrie and Żżo Charlery. The Archives and Collections reflect the School’s rich creative and pedagogical history through a wide range of materials relating to its people, buildings, and teaching practices. A&C are thrilled to support the Fellows as they engage with the collections, bringing fresh curatorial perspectives and new dialogues that will deepen understanding of GSA’s heritage and its continuing relevance today.
Zoë Zo, Zoë Tumika & Zoë Guthrie and Żżo Charlery bring a history of shared learning and organising: co-founders of SPIT Collective (Edinburgh, 2017), committee members at Transmission Gallery (Glasgow, 2020), and recent peer learning/producing consultancy with Body Remedy (Glasgow).
For further information, please contact press@gsa.ac.uk
NOTES FOR EDITORS
Biographies
From and living in Glasgow, Scotland, Zoë is an artist-curator working under the name Zoë Zo, Zoë Tumika & Zoë Guthrie. Through ceramics, moving image, and an emerging engagement with sound, they explore states of untethering—navigating multiple temporalities and ways of being. Frameworks from Black Feminism, Black Geographies and Black Studies underpin their approach to narrative building and dismantling, to listening and questioning and the exercising of libratory practices.
Since 2023 Zo, Tumika & Guthrie have been studying under the project BLACK CLYDE, an (ever) developing cartography which houses different areas of focus in their research-based making practice. Initiated from the River Clyde at Glasgow, they generate an ‘otherwise’ understanding of space, place, and time through the materials and residuals encountered in this particular realm of reality.
Żżo / Zoë Charlery is a Glasgow-based artist and producer working through curatorial, conversational and research-led forms. Their practice engages with theories of deconstruction, Black geographies, and performances of in/sanity; tracing how paradox, incoherence and discomfort produce space for relation. Rooted in reading, listening, speculation and dialogue, their work explores the vagueness and hauntings of subtext: opacity, dissent and discomfort as both material and method. Through events and spatial interventions, they use improvised dis/comfort as a mode of activation and a sketch of possibility. Concerned with the edges and slips of transcendence and degradation, they experiment with uprooting and untethering as forms of groundedness; assembling spaces that hold individual and collective modes of study, gathering and speculation.
About The Glasgow School of Art (GSA):
The Glasgow School of Art (GSA) is internationally recognised as one of Europe’s leading independent university-level institutions for education and research in the visual creative disciplines. Our studio-based, specialist, practice-led teaching, learning and research draw talented individuals with a shared passion for visual culture and creative production from all over the world.
Originally founded in 1845 as one of the first Government Schools of Design, the School’s history can be traced back to 1753 and the establishment of the Foulis Academy delivering a European-style art education. Today, the GSA is an international community of over 3500 students and staff across architecture, design, digital, fine art and innovation in our campuses in Glasgow and Altyre (in the Scottish Highlands) and a thriving Open Studio programme delivering non-degree provision to over 1500 students annually.
About Jerwood Foundation
Established in 1977 for John Jerwood MC (1918-1991) by Alan Grieve CBE, Jerwood Foundation is a UK charity committed to supporting excellence and emerging talent in the arts in the UK. Alan Grieve was appointed Chairman Emeritus in 2023, and at this time Rupert Tyler was appointed Chairman. The organisation is led by Lara Wardle, Executive Director and Trustee and to date Jerwood Foundation has committed over £112 million to support the arts in the UK.
Jerwood Foundation owns the Jerwood Collection of modern and contemporary art, and an important part of Jerwood’s philanthropic mission is delivered by the Collection through its loaning programme and promotion of a broader understanding, interpretation and enjoyment of art. Also included in the Jerwood group of organisations is Jerwood Space, which was Jerwood’s first major capital project when established by Jerwood Foundation in Southwark in 1998. Jerwood Space is a dedicated rehearsal space providing theatre, musical theatre, opera and dance companies with an outstanding environment within which to create their work.
