Why Black Museums 2023:
Honoring the Past, Envisioning the Future 

Art Galleries at Black Studies is excited to announce a multiyear program titled Why Black Museums, which honors and examines Black museums’ contributions to the museum field. This spring we hosted our inaugural events, which highlighted several scholars and professionals working within the Black Studies department at The University of Texas at Austin Black Studies department as well as Black museums across the United States.

On Friday, April 21, 2023 Why Black Museums commenced with a day of events dedicated to the theme: Honoring the Past, Envisioning the Future. The morning roundtable (10:30am-12pm) featured Dr. Ted Gordon, Rachel Winston, and Phillip Townsend, who conversed on the development of the African and African Diaspora Studies Department at The University of Texas at Austin.

The afternoon panel featured Dr. Ariana Curtis, Cameron Shaw, and Dr. Cherise Smith. Panelists discussed their personal and professional connections with Black museums, the development of the institutions they now call home, and the future of community-focused museums. Delphine Sims and Dr. Gaila Sims will moderate and lead a Q&A.  

Honoring the Past,
Envisioning the Future

Friday, April 21, 2023
WCP 2.120 Meeting Room

Panel 1: Edmund T. Gordon, Rachel Winston, Phillip Townsend
10:30–12 p.m.

Panel 2: Ariana Curtis, Cameron Shaw, Cherise Smith
12:45–2:40 p.m. 

Dr. Ariana A. Curtis is dedicated to building inclusive frameworks that disrupt systemic marginalization, misrepresentation, and erasure. She is the first curator of Latinx Studies at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, where she leads research and collections that center Latinidad through an African American lens. She is curator of the award-winning Latinx collections portal and has held leadership roles in major Smithsonian initiatives including Our Shared Future: Reckoning with Our Racial Past and the American Women’s History Initiative.

Ariana has published in academic and popular outlets and has appeared in national media including Refinery29, Latino USA, and The Root. Among her many conference presentations and keynote addresses, Ariana has spoken at South by Southwest, Chautauqua Institution, Afro-Latino Fest NYC, and The Sundance Film Festival. Her TED talk about women and museum representation has over 3 million views.

Ariana holds a doctorate in anthropology, with a concentration in race, gender, and social justice. She is a Fulbright scholar, a founding member of the Black Latinas Know Collective, and member of the board for: Duke Libraries, the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, and the Museum Association of the Caribbean.

Dr. Edmund T. Gordon is the founding (former) chair of the African and African Diaspora Studies Department, Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies and Anthropology of the African Diaspora, and Executive Director of the Contextualization and Commemoration Initiative at The University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Gordon also formerly served as Vice Provost for Diversity, as Associate Vice President of Thematic Initiatives and Community Engagement of the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, and as Director of the Center for African and African American Studies at The University of Texas. His publications include Disparate Diasporas: Identity and Politics in an African-Nicaraguan Community (1998).  

Cameron Shaw was appointed Executive Director of the California African American Museum (CAAM) in February 2021, after serving as Deputy Director and Chief Curator since September 2019. A native of Los Angeles, Shaw previously served as Executive Director and Founding Editor of New Orleans-based Pelican Bomb, a non-profit contemporary art organization that presented a forum for exhibitions, public programs, and arts journalism. In addition to her institutional practice, Shaw has worked as a writer and editor since 2008. Her writing has been widely published, including in The New York Times, Art in America, the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and BOMB Magazine, as well as in numerous books and exhibition catalogues. She was awarded a Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for Short-Form Writing in 2009 and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation | Art in America Writing Fellowship in 2015.

Dr. Gaila Sims and 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. She researches the intersections between the history of photography and Black geographies.

Dr. Cherise Smith is the Joseph D. Jamail Chair in African American Studies in the Department African & African Diaspora Studies at The University of Texas at Austin where she is affiliated with Art History. She serves as the Executive Director of the Art Galleries at Black Studies where she spearheads Black Studies’ Art and Archive Initiative which seeks to expand UT’s holdings of art and material collections relating to people of African descent and increase its exhibition spaces. Under its auspices, she created two exhibition spaces—the Idea Lab and the Christian-Green Gallery—and she has shepherded donations of artworks by Norman Lewis, Romare Bearden, and Charles White among others.

Phillip Townsend is the Curator of Art at Art Galleries at Black Studies (AGBS) at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art + Art History specializing in modern and contemporary art of the African Diaspora, focusing on the politics of identity and representational strategies of BIPOC artists. He received his M.A. in Art History from UT (2016) and his B.A. in Art History from The University of South Florida (2014). A founding member of the Austin-based curatorial collective Neon Queen Collective, Phillip co-curated Notes on Sugar: The Work of María Magdalena Campos-Pons (2018) at the Christian Green Gallery and Like the Lonely Traveler: Video Works by María Magdalena Campos–Pons (2018) at the Visual Arts Center. Phillip also co-curated Charles White: Celebrating the Gordon Gift (2019), an exhibition presented by the Blanton Museum in partnership with African and African Diaspora Studies (AADS) and the Art Galleries at Black Studies (AGBS) at The University of Texas at Austin. At AGBS, he recently curated Wura-Natasha Ogunji: earth, body, spirit and Melvin Edwards: WIRE(D) + CHAIN(ED), a major exhibition of work by Melvin Edwards, a Houston native and pioneer in the history of African American art and sculpture.

Rachel E. Winston is an archivist, curator, and Black memory worker based out of Austin, Texas. She is the founding Black Diaspora Archivist at The University of Texas at Austin, and leads the university’s effort to build a library special collection documenting the Black experience across the Americas and Caribbean. Her work promotes research and study on the Black Diaspora through primary source material, curated exhibitions, and archival activism. 

Rachel is currently a Council Member for the Society of American Archivists, a Mellon Cultural Heritage Fellow at the Rare Book School, and co-PI for the Texas Domestic Slave Trade project. She is an alumna of Davidson College, the Coro Fellows Program in Public Affairs, and The University of Texas at Austin. 

For questions and media requests, please email gaila.c.sims@gmail.com.