Pre-registration & Reception

TIME: 4 – 6 pm

LOCATION: 1200 Getty Center Dr, Los Angeles, CA 90049

KEYNOTE

Kellie Jones and Deborah Willis: Black Curators Matter in Conversation. Moderated by Bridget R. Cooks.

DATE: September 28, 2026

TIME: 6 – 7 pm

LOCATION: 1200 Getty Center Dr, Los Angeles, CA 90049

ABOUT

The speakers will focus on their own work and some of the curators interviewed in the book such as Thelma Golden, Kellie Jones, Richard J. Powell, Lowery Sims, and Franklin Sirmans. Black Curators Matter: Conversations on Art and Change is a publication (Eds. Kellie Jones and Tumelo Mosaka Getty Publications, July 2026) about the complicated history of Black cultures in museums which foregrounds the experiences of Black curators who have worked in the field since the early 1970s and who are both witnesses to and progenitors of major change and transformation in the curatorial field, the museum world, and beyond. Each term in the project title—“black,” “curators,” “matter”—inhabits meaningful points of entry into the outstanding impact that Black curators have had in visual arts and culture.

BRIDGET R. COOKS

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.

KELLIE JONES

Dr. Kellie Jones is Hans Hofmann Professor of Modern Art in the Department of Art History & Archaeology and Professor of African American & African Diaspora Studies 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 has received numerous awards for her work from the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University; Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and a term as Scholar-in-Residence at the Terra Foundation for American Art in Europe in Giverny, France. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Boston) and the American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia), she was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 2016. Dr. Jones’s writings have appeared in a multitude of exhibition catalogues and journals. She is the author of EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art (2011), and South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s (2017) and editor and co-editor of Black Curators Matter: Conversations on Art and Change, and David Hammons among others.

DEBORAH WILLIS

Photographer and historian Dr. Deborah Willis is Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at New York University. She is the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She is the author/co-author of several books including Reflections in Black: A Reframing; Photography & the Black Arts Movement; Kamala: Her Historic, Joyful, and Auspicious Sprint to the White House; The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship and Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present, among others. Professor Willis’s curated exhibitions include: “Reflections in Black: A Reframing”, “Migrations and Meanings in Art”, “Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits” at the International Center of Photography; Out of Fashion Photography; Framing Beauty at the Henry Art Gallery and “Reframing Beauty: Intimate Moments” at Indiana University.