To support “The Chicago Assembly,” offering professional development and network building for a group of Chicago curators, and the “Curatorial Forum,” a national convening of curators at EXPO CHICAGO that explores urgent issues within the curatorial and museum fields. The Assembly cohort helps to shape the 2024 Forum, focused on the civic role of American contemporary art institutions, parts of which are open to the public. Additionally, cohort members receive mentorship tailored to their needs and interests. The project takes place as part of the Terra Foundation initiative Art Design Chicago. 

To support the symposium “Picturing the Black Racial Imaginary” in January 2024 at the Virginia Museum of Fine Art (VMFA). The symposium will bring together leading scholars, writers, artists, and community activists for presentations and discussions designed to elucidate ideas in the exhibition Dawoud Bey: Elegy, curated by VMFA’s Valerie Cassel Oliver. Panelists and speakers plan to explore concepts related to the Black experience in America and their effect on shaping the racial imaginary in art and cultural theory. 

To support “Creole Miami: Generations of Black Miami Artmaking” in fall 2023 at the University of Miami. “Creole Miami” will be the first convening devoted to an intergenerational conversation of Black Miami artists working from the late 1960s to present. Miami is celebrated as the crossroads of people, ideas, and multicultural “Americanness.” This gathering intends to show how artists have represented Miami’s dynamic hemispheric and transnational Black social histories as well as the historical specificities and nuances of heterogenous Black neighborhoods. 

To support “Queer Art | Queer Archives,” a two-day symposium developed and co-hosted by Dr. Miriam Kienle (associate professor, University of Kentucky) and Dr. Jennifer Sichel (assistant professor, University of Louisville). To be held in September 2024, the symposium will bring together emerging and established scholars to investigate the theoretical stakes and methodological challenges of doing Queer archival labor in American art history. 

To support a three-day hybrid convening around the exhibition Véxoa: We Know, curated by the Brazilian Indigenous curator Naine Terena, at Tufts University Art Galleries in 2023. The convening reflects on how to produce art history and museum practices that incorporate Indigenous epistemologies, including themes invoking Indigenous temporality and cosmo-technologies; land, ancestralism, and ecology; and Indigenous activism. 

To support a two-day symposium in September 2023 titled “Music Video as Black Art” (MVBA) to mark the ten-year anniversary of Liquid Blackness’s founding as an academic research group. The event seeks to explore the visual imagination of Black music and the musical roots of contemporary Black visual arts by focusing on creative insights that are producing the most consequential and global Black visual aesthetics of our time. 

To support the convening “Deconstructing the Boundaries: A Future of Land & Food Resilience Centering Black, Brown and Indigenous Relationships with the Land” in 2024. This convening, presented by Indigo Arts Alliance in collaboration with Costal Maine Botanical Gardens, explores relationships among land use, landholding, the growing of food, and the sharing of nourishment. It examines how shelter can be offered and created via strategies and modes of being that exist outside of dominant normative US cultural practices.  

To support the “Mississippi River Curatorial Assembly,” a professional development program for eight curators based in the Midwest. The program seeks to advance their practice through regional networks of exchange and collaboration and to produce greater awareness of regional art histories and identities. It provides an investigative framework to foster a new cultural discourse around American art, based on the diverse practices that take place in the Mississippi River Basin region. 

To support a community college art museum leadership convening at the Housatonic Museum of Art at Housatonic Community College in October 2024. This convening will serve as the first of its kind in bringing community college art museum and gallery leaders together on the national level. It will provide community college museum and gallery leaders with the opportunity to come together, network to identify shared concerns, determine a way forward, and think about advocacy efforts on behalf of their students and campus museums. 

To support a curatorial colloquium on the reinstallation of the permanent galleries of Native American art at the Burke Museum’s Bill Holm Center in November 2023. The 2023 gathering builds on a 2022 colloquium and provides a forum for curators of Native American and First Nations art collections to discuss issues related to ethical exhibition practices, protocols of care, access, and collaboration. This event is a seminar-style colloquium for curators, emerging and experienced alike, who can bring their understanding of Indigenous artistic and cultural heritage to a space of deep conversation, focusing on continued curatorial training and professional development.