Dr. Les Joynes

Advising to Museums and Heritage Institutions

The Futures of Cultural Institutions

What is the museum of the future? How can museums develop diversity, equity and inclusion within their mission and deliverables? How can they enhance audience satisfaction? How can arts administration professionals work with a new generation of artists that are exploring new interfaces of materials and ideas. And finally, how can they engage the museums of the future?

Advising and Museum Research

Dr. Les Joynes (born Santa Barbara California) is an arts scholar, critic and public speaker based in New York. As a museums scholar, he is exploring the futures of museums and building strategies that support museums, foundations and cultural institutions in realizing their creative vision. He has advised US and international organizations including Du Pont de Nemours, 3M, General Electric, Bayer, Braun, Dow, and General Motors. He has conducted museum research for the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum and lectured at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, the Inside Out Art Museum, Beijing, and presented on his research museums of the future at Museum 2050 at the Long Museum Shanghai.

As 2022 Fulbright Senior Fellow at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi, he has been examining South Asian arts through performance and ritual. He serves on the Editorial Board for ProjectAnywhere - a peer reviewed journal on contemporary art at University of Melbourne and has advised Fortune 500 organizations including 3M, Du Pont, General Electric, Dow, Bayer and General Motors.

Curating since 1994 he served on the curatorial team of first Taipei Biennial "Sites of Desire" in 1998 and has curated and produced exhibitions and performances in the UK, France, Germany, Norway, Singapore, Mongolia, China and upcoming India.

He has conducted museum research for the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum and lectured on the future of exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, the Inside Out Art Museum, Beijing, and the Long Museum in Shanghai. Serving as a Leadership Coach at Columbia Business School, he introduced a museum leadership coaching to the Yale Center for British Art in 2019.

Since 1973 he has visited over 1,200 museums in the Americas, Europe, North Africa, and across Asia and in Japan served as lead curator for Networking in Tokyo which featured as part of the UK-Japan Cultural Year In 1998 he served on the Curatorial team of the Inaugural Taipei Biennial “Sites of Desire” exhibition which launched Taiwan into the contemporary arts. Since then he has curated and produced exhibitions in the UK, France, China, Japan, Mongolia, South Korea and upcoming in India and Sri Lanka. He is founder of the Inclusive Biennial a traveling biennial of artists exploring themes of gender, culture and identity.

Publications

He has written on contemporary arts for Art in America, Flash Art, Springer, the Journal for Artistic Research and his work has appeared on NHK Television, Sculpture Magazine, Commons & Sense Japan, Art Monthly and CCTV. He is author of “Interfacing Technology with Site” ISEA International Symposium of Electronic Art, Gwangju, Korea (2019); New Institutional Models: China’s Cultural Landscape by Mid-Century, Long Museum, Shanghai (2018); Going Beyond: Art as Adventure (2018) O’Neill, R and Werner, J (eds.), Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars. (2019) ; Anywhere v.1.(2015), Melbourne, Australia: University of Melbourne and New York: Parsons School of Art, Media and Technology, Parsons, New School, New York. (2015); Inside Out Art Museum, New York: LeRoy Neiman Foundation [catalogue] (2015); Art and Research at the Outermost Limits of Site Specificity, Newcastle, Australia: University of Newcastle, (2014); Octopus, Journal for Visual Culture. Irvine: University of California, Irvine (2011); ”Multi-spatial Performance: at Bauhaus-Dessau, Bühnenstudios der Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau [Internet] (2008); Yoshitomo Nara, Art in America (1997); London and the New Pathetic, Springer (1996). His writing and artwork has featured in Museum 2050 published by the Long Museum of Art, Shanghai, Art in America, Flash Art, Art Monthly London, Commons and Sense Japan, NHK Television Japan and the Journal for Artistic Research. See writing samples (here).

Awards

He is recipient of the Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Award India (2020-2022), US Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs Grant for Colombia (2020), US Department of State American Arts Incubator ZERO1 Award for Performance Art and Technology (2019), Fulbright Hays US Public Diplomacy Award, Mongolia (2014) and China (2017), CEC ArtsLink Foundation Grant, St. Petersburg, Russia (2017), Renmin University of China Merit Award for Teaching, Beijing (2017) , Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) Language Scholar National Cheng Kung University (2016), Wheatley Foundation Fellow, Birmingham City University, UK (2016),US Department of State Field Research Fellow, American Center for Mongolian Studies (2016, Research Fellow, Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN) University of the Arts London (2015), Artist Fellow, Nordic Artists Center Norway (2008) and Edwin Austin Abbey Fellowship, New York (2009), Bauhaus Foundation Fellow, Dessau, Germany (2009), Japanese Ministry of Education and Culture Scholar (Monbusho) (1998-2001), Erasmus Scholar, Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-arts, Paris (1995).

Education

Dr. Joynes is trained in both arts and administration and received his BA (Hons) Fine Art from Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, London; MA Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London; Masters in Fine Art from Musashino Art University, Tokyo; MBA from California State University; M.Sc from Boston University and the Vrije Universiteit Brussels Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences. He was awarded his PhD from the Faculty of Art, Environment and Technology, Leeds Beckett University, UK and Post-Doctorate in Fine Art from the School of Art and Communications at University of São Paulo, Brazil.

Leadership in Cultural Institutions

Dr. Joynes is founder of Museum.coach and initiated Museum Leadership and Coaching at the Yale Center for British Art at Yale University. He is a certified Leadership Coach to MBAs, EMBAs and MFAs at Columbia University and PhDs at the University of Melbourne, Australia and GoldAward Mentor at University of London.

Teaching

He teaches Modern and Contemporary art history and multi-media experiential practices at Renmin University in Beijing and has lectured at University of Cambridge, Teachers College, Peking University Institute of Cultural Industries, University of California Santa Barbara, University of the Arts London (UAL), University of Coventry, and the Bard-Smolny Program in St Petersburg. He is visiting faculty at the Institute of Interdisciplinary Arts at Visva-Bharati University in West Bengal and upcoming at the Royal University of Bhutan.

Affiliations

He serves on the Museum Committee of the College Arts Association and is member of the American Association of Art Museums he has coached academics and artists at at CAA conferences. Les is a member of the ICF and IOC Affiliate of Harvard Medical School, the American Alliance of Art Museums, and member of the Museum Committee at College Arts Association.