Art Galleries at Black Studies (AGBS) is excited to announce the second symposium in its multi-year program Why Black Museums, an annual series that honors and examines the cultural contributions of Black and ethnically specific museums. This program series asks: how do Black museums create their own imaginative ways of being museum spaces?
Taking place on Thursday, March 7, 2024 “Why Black Museums: Exhibitions and Relations” explores the connections among past and present exhibitions of Black art and historical objects. Examining the myriad ways that Black individuals and communities have developed for collecting, preserving, and exhibiting art and well-made objects, “Exhibitions and Relations” considers how these ways shape contemporary museum practice.
The audience is invited to join the moderators and presenters beginning at 10 a.m. for a coffee reception. We invite artists, scholars, museum professionals, students, and community members to gather with us in appreciation of these incredible speakers and cultural spaces and to look forward to these integral institutions’ future innovations.
The morning roundtable features Austin-based historians and curators Carre Adams of the George Washington Carver Museum, Cultural and Genealogy Center; Ulili Emore of the Contextualization & Commemoration Initiative at The University of Texas; and Dr. Jacqueline Smith-Francis of the Austin History Center. Moderated by Dr. Gaila Sims, Curator of African American History at the Fredericksburg Area Museum, roundtable participants will discuss their work to preserve and interpret Black history in central Texas.
The afternoon panel features curators and scholars Dr. Kellie Jones, 2016 MacArthur Fellow and author of EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art (2011) and Dr. Bridget R. Cooks, author of the award-winning study Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (2011). Dr. Jones’ paper, "Black Curators Matter: An Oral History Project," draws on Jones’ experiences curating at the Studio Museum in Harlem and Johannesburg Biennial as well as her germinal exhibitions: Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction, 1964-1980 (Studio Museum, 2006), Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980 (Hammer Museum, 2011), and Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties (Brooklyn Museum, 2014). Dr. Cooks’ paper, “Black Art, White Galleries: Two Case Studies” examines the incorporation of Black art into the permanent collections galleries at two mainstream museums and considers how the integration of Black art into mainstream collections may change prevalent narratives of American art. Following their papers, Drs. Jones and Cooks will join in discussion with Dr. Delphine Sims, Assistant Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Acknowledging the promise of accessibility and sustainability, this event is offered in a hybrid format, for those interested in participating from near and far. Those participating virtually may find the event on AGBS’ YouTube Channel, where a recording of the event will also be made available.
“Why Black Museums: Exhibitions and Relations”
Thursday, March 7, 2024
10 - 10:30 am: Coffee reception
10:30 - 12 pm: Roundtable:
Jacqueline Smith-Francis, Carre Adams, and Ulili Emore
12 - 1 pm: Lunch provided
1 - 3 pm: Presentations:
Dr. Kellie Jones, "Black Curators Matter: An Oral History Project"
Dr. Bridget R. Cooks, “Black Art, White Galleries: Two Case Studies”
Free and Open to the Public
About Why Black Museums
Why Black Museums is a collaboration among Dr. Cherise Smith, Executive Director of Art Galleries at Black Studies, Dr. Gaila Sims, and Dr. Delphine Sims. This multiyear initiative was conceived to honor and examine Black museums’ contributions to the museum field, and to celebrate AGBS as a promising addition to the larger community of ethnically specific museums.
Carre Adams is the Chief Curator and Director of the Carver Museum & Cultural Center in Austin, Texas—an institution dedicated to the collection, preservation, and exhibition of Black material culture.
In addition to his curatorial practice, he is also an artistic director, mixed-media artist, filmmaker, and music producer. His creative work explores love, sovereignty, and inheritance. His projects have been featured on Arts in Context produced by PBS, Feministing, Glasstire: Texas Visual Art News & Reviews, Art in America, Sightlines, and Forbes.
A former co-director at allgo, a statewide queer people of color arts and justice organization, he has repeatedly sought professional opportunities that allow him to align his creative pursuits with movements for racial equity and justice. He received his B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College in Visual Arts and African and African Diaspora Studies.
Dr. Bridget R. Cooks is a scholar and curator of American art. Her research focuses on visual art by African Americans, Black visual culture, and museum criticism. She serves as Chancellor’s Fellow and Professor of African American Studies and Art History at the University of California, Irvine. She is core faculty in the PhD Programs in Visual Studies and Culture and Theory. Her books, articles, and essays can be found widely across interdisciplinary academic publications and art exhibition catalogues. She is most well-known as the author of the book, Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (UMass, 2011) which received the inaugural James A. Porter & David C. Driskell Book Award in African American Art History.
Cooks’ first career was in museum education. In this capacity she worked at the Oakland Museum of California, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Cooks has curated several exhibitions including, Grafton Tyler Brown: Exploring California (2018) at the Pasadena Museum of California Art, Ernie Barnes: A Retrospective at the California African American Museum (2019) (CAAM), The Black Index (four venue national tour), Dissolve (Langson IMCA, University Art Gallery, UC Irvine) and Lava Thomas: Homecoming (2022) at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts and Spelman College Museum of Fine Art.
She has received numerous awards, grants and fellowships from organizations including the Ford Foundation, Henry Luce Foundation, Southern Poverty Law Center, Getty Research Institute, and California Humanities.
Ulili Emore is an east coast native, hailing from South Jersey, and a doctoral student in the Program in Higher Education Leadership (PHEL) at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on the racial disparities in student loan debt at the graduate-school level and its impact on the socioeconomic futures of Black students. Additionally, she is interested in understanding how increased credentialization within the labor market contributes to the debt crisis for Black students and whether Black students see a true return on investment (e.g., salary gains, upward professional mobility, etc.) for their graduate degrees in relation to the financial risk of increased debt accumulation.
In addition to being a doctoral student, Ulili works full-time at the University of Texas at Austin as a Program Manager in the Contextualization & Commemoration Initiatives (CCI) unit within the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost (EVPP). In this role, she is responsible for the project management and coordination of the Sweatt v. Painter Gallery and Entry at T.S. Painter Hall and the Precursors We are Texas East Mall commemorative projects. These projects serve as a scholarly public history endeavor to recognize, acknowledge, and understand UT's past, while honoring the Black men and women whose legacy paved the way for a more inclusive UT.
Dr. Kellie Jones is Chair of the Department African American and African Diaspora Studies and Hans Hofmann Professor of Modern Art in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. Her research interests include African American and African Diaspora artists, Latinx and Latin American Artists, and issues in contemporary art and museum theory.
Dr. Jones, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has also received awards for her work from the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University and Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation. In 2016 she was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.
Dr. Jones’s writings have appeared in a multitude of exhibition catalogues and journals. She is the author of two books published by Duke University Press, EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art (2011), and South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s (2017), which received the Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Criticism Award from the American Book Award in 2018 and was named a Best Book of the Decade in 2019 by ArtNews, Best Art Book of 2017 in The New York Times, and a Best Book of 2017 in Artforum.
Dr. Jones has also worked as a curator for over three decades and has numerous major national and international exhibitions to her credit. Her exhibition Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980, at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), was named one of the best exhibitions of 2011 and 2012 by Artforum, and best thematic show nationally by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). She was co-curator of Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the 1960s at the Brooklyn Museum, was named one the best exhibitions of 2014 by Artforum.
Originally from Oakland, California, Dr. Jacqueline Smith-Francis has spent close to twenty years documenting, preserving, and sharing familial and community histories by and about Black and African American communities in Texas, California, and Arkansas. She specializes in developing presentations and workshops that blend history and archival preservation with social-justice advocacy and mindfulness-based pedagogies. Dr. Smith-Francis is currently the African American Community Archivist at the Austin History Center, where she enjoys collaborating with communities to uncover and celebrate the unique stories and traditions of past and present Austin communities.
Dr. Gaila Sims and Dr. Delphine Sims are sisters from Riverside, California. They both work with and write about museums: Delphine is a curator dedicated to supporting artists of the Black Diaspora, and Gaila works on public history, museum display, and archival practice. Gaila is the Curator of African American History and Special Projects at the Fredericksburg Area Museum. Her scholarship critiques American museums and interpretations of slavery. Delphine is a doctoral candidate in the history of art at the University of California, Berkeley and Assistant Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She researches the intersections between the history of photography and Black geographies.