IN THE ARTS

My curatorial work includes exhibitions in Chicago, Baltimore, and most recently Rome, where I also had the opportunity to delve into other sorts of projects, such as literary readings (live and Covid-era virtual) and musical performances. A selection of my most recent curatorial projects can be viewed below, and more (and more to come) here and here.

REGENERATION

American Academy in Rome April 13 - June 12, 2022

Rome and its ruins have long provoked an aestheticization of decay—a meditation on the frailty of the physical world and the inevitable passage of time. Regeneration gathered the work of contemporary artists to consider this paradigm with fresh eyes and push up against a paradox: that decay can seed a new, often beautiful materiality, whether of dust, rust, fragments, or weeds. Not far beyond these aesthetic matters lie ethical ones, concerning permanence and transmutation: how we conceive of and value change, and the struggles in choosing what to keep and what to let go.

These perspectives have a particular relevance to Rome and Italy. The Roman ruin is of course an archetype, while ancient Roman industry has left layers of dust still evident in the stratification of glacial ice. As an historic crossroads, Rome is also the nexus of cultural dialogues that span the globe from antiquity to the present. Regeneration invites us to consider this theme in Rome but also across differing geographic contexts, historical frames, and systems of value.

The artists presented in Regeneration represent five continents: Africa, Asia, North and South America, and Europe. They work across scales of time that are equally expansive, from the geologic—the pace at which the earth itself is degrading—to the momentary, a tempo we can register with our eyes and ears. The decline they trace is in some cases sociopolitical, in others environmental, and in others a simple fact of nature and materiality.

Co-curated with AAR interim Andrew Heiskell Arts Director Lindsay Harris. The exhibition can still be experienced virtually, in a bilingual AAR exhibition website and through the (free) Bloomberg Connects art and culture app.

Read my exhibition essay, Coming Apart, and/or listen to a conversation I had with Claire Lyons (Getty Museum) and Webber Ndoro (ICCROM), “Making the Past: Perspectives on Keeping and Letting Go.”

NATASHA TRETHEWEY: POEMS FOR ROME

Villa Aurelia, July 6, 2022

An evening of readings of poems selected by Natasha Trethewey for their special resonance in Rome. The poems—many inspired by paintings and speaking to matters of body, identity, presence, and memory—were newly translated into Italian for this occasion by Alessandro Giammei, read by the poet Silvia Bre, and published by Fuorilinea Editore.

Co-curated with Maria Ida Gaeta, Secretary General of the Committee for the Celebrations of the Centenary of the Death of Dante Alighieri and Founder of the Casa delle Letterature, Rom

STREETSCAPES

American Academy in Rome, Villa Doria-Pamphilij, Bramante’s Tempietto June 7 - 17, 2021

Responding to the restrictions and limits of the COVID-19 era, this exhibition featured the work of four American Academy in Rome Fellows, who produced sculptures for the Academy’s outdoor spaces and other sites in the Monteverde neighborhood. Animating the pine groves of the Villa Doria-Pamphilij Park and the portico of Bramante’s Tempietto at the Reál Academia de España, as well as the courtyards of the Academy’s main building, these site-specific works invited viewers—including residents of Monteverde and passersby—to re-engage with familiar places and explore new vistas. It provided a balance of stasis and movement suitable to the spring of 2021, an time of tentatively hopeful reopenings in Rome.

Download the exhibition brochure here.

PORTRAITS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY IN ROME: REINSTALLATION

The AAR has a long history of displaying portraits of Rome Prize Fellows behind the bar—a collection that is added to regularly by the Fellows themselves. As the Fellowship classes have diversified so too have the portraits, reflecting the arrival of women artists (not until 1950), artists and scholars of color (1949), and a more varied array of creative practices too. (By tradition, no photographs were permitted, as photography was not fully recognized as an art form.) Change came, gradually, but because the installation of the bar was organic, expanding from the center as portraits we added, the space was still dominated by a “white dude wall.” Signs of an evolving Academy hung at the margins. In 2020 we decided to change that.

Click here to see more curatorial projects

With encouragement from then AAR Director John Ochsendorf, I began the task of reorganizing the portrait collection. I wanted the installation to be honest and clear about the Academy’s history, but to foreground an inclusive present and future rather than an exclusionary past. After speaking with many constituents—Fellows, regular visitors, and staff—I chose to keep all portraits together, to cluster them in broad chronological groups, and to place the most recent Fellows behind the bar, where they have the most visibility and presence. The historic Fellows are still there, but now face the bar from the opposite wall. There are photographic portraits, group portraits, and soon also a spectacular pair of drawings of the AAR’s first Black Fellows, donated by the artist Whitfield Lovell.