Veteran curator Marian Pastor Roces founded TAO MANAGEMENT CORPORATION to be known by its brand name TAOINC — with partners in 1997, to help give momentum to the shift of curatorship from a 19th century practice of custodianship, to the current craft informed by critical theory.

 

While it maintains a network of conservators and collections/records keepers, the corporation cultivates its deepest relationships with intellectuals, designers with a philosophical bent, avante-gardes of myriad cosmopolitan centers, critics of exhausted systems, advocates of emancipatory projects, institution builders, and scientists who understand acts of the imagination.

 

TAOINC has also taken fastidious care of its links with leaders of indigenous communities and other peoples on the peripheries of mainstream societies. It understands these links as precisely the web to reinforce, to incorporate curatorship within agenda for social equality. The corporation fosters this utopian imperative as its raison d’être.

 

Hence, the partners and staff approach their work — conceptualizing, developing, refining, physically realizing, and institutionalizing museums, exhibitions, public art projects, books, and research programs — as enmeshed in the dynamics of social transformation in the specific locales of the various projects.

 

TAOINC, likewise seeks to advance ethical analysis of ethical domains, in extending its work to include analyses of cultural and political data to assist urban planners; formulating and implementing culture-based projects in given communities; and evaluating museums and cultural projects themselves.