Baltimore Museum of Art Names Bell Brown As Contemporary Art Chief – RisePEI
The Baltimore Museum of Artwork announced Thursday that it had promoted art historian Jessica Bell Brown to curator and the brand new head of its modern artwork division. Brown had beforehand served as an affiliate curator of up to date artwork since becoming a member of the establishment in 2019.
In her new position, Brown will now oversee two affiliate curators, two curatorial assistants, and a curatorial fellow, in addition to handle the museum’s rising assortment of up to date artwork and proceed to arrange exhibitions.
“Since becoming a member of the BMA, Jessica has positioned artists’ voices on the core of her curatorial work, creating new platforms to expertise artwork as envisioned by its makers and bridging institutional and creative visions and approaches,” Asma Naeem, interim co-director and chief curator, mentioned in an announcement. “Her imaginative and prescient, eager insights, and dedication to artists might be integral because the BMA continues to diversify its collections and develop the narratives of artwork by its exhibitions and applications.”
One of many extra notable exhibitions Brown has curated is an exploration of the Nice Migration, titled “A Motion in Each Course: Legacies of the Nice Migration,” which she co-curated with Ryan N. Dennis, the chief curator of the Mississippi Museum of Artwork. The Nice Migration was an exodus of greater than six million African Individuals from the agricultural South from the early twentieth century to the Nineteen Seventies. The mass motion produced a brand new Black city tradition within the North and West cities and cities they settled in.
For the exhibition, Brown and Dennis commissioned 12 intergenerational Black artists to make new work delving into this main historic and cultural shift by a private lens. The exhibition opens on the MMA on Saturday, earlier than touring to the BMA in October.
Final yr, Brown contributed a brief response for our sister publication Artwork in America on the way forward for the museum, writing:
An Affirmation:
The long run doesn’t belong to the whims of navel gazers.
By no means greater than now, the longer term belongs to rigor. It belongs to integrity. The long run is for expansiveness. The long run is specificity.
The long run is polyphonic. The long run is most fertile on the sides of the canon. The long run is collectivity. The long run is relaxation. The long run is tender. The long run is you.
Previous to becoming a member of the BMA, Brown served as a consulting curator at Gracie Mansion Conservancy in New York and held posts at three different New York establishments: Museum of Trendy Artwork, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Inventive Time.