Jessica Bell Brown, Curator and Writer

Jessica Bell Brown has recently been named Executive Director of the Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU. Previously, she served as the Curator and Department Head for Contemporary Art at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Her recent exhibition projects include How Do We Know The World?, Thaddeus Mosley: Forest, Stephanie Syjuco: Vanishing Point (Overlay), and A Movement In Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration co-organized with the Mississippi Museum of Art. Prior to the BMA she was the Consulting Curator at Gracie Mansion Conservancy in New York, where she curated She Persists: A Century of Women Artists in New York, 1919-2019 with First Lady Chirlane McCray. Previously, she held roles at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Creative Time. Her writing has been featured in several artist monographs and catalogues, including Flash Art, Artforum, Art Papers, Hyperallergic, and The Brooklyn Rail.

Chakaia Booker, Artist

Booker’s works are in more than 40 public collections and exhibited across US, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Booker was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005. Recent public installation highlights include Millennium Park, Chicago (2016-2018), Garment District Alliance Broadway Plazas, New York, NY (2014), and National Museum of Women in the Arts New York Avenue Sculpture Project, Washington DC (2012).

Tony Cokes, Artist

Tony Cokes lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where he serves as Professor in the

Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. A solo show of his work is

currently on view at the Dia Bridgehampton, The Dan Flavin Art Institute, through May 2024.

Cokes also has work on view at Fondazione Prada, Milan, through February 22, 2024. Cokes

was awarded the 2022-23 Carla Fendi Rome Prize in Art and Technology. In 2022, he was the

subject of a major survey jointly organized by the Haus der Kunst and Kunstverein in Munich.

Other recent solo exhibitions include De Balie, Amsterdam (2022); Greene Naftali, New York

(2022, 2018); Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, Rochester (2021); MACRO

Contemporary Art Museum, Rome (2021); CIRCA, London (2021); Museu d’Art Contemporani

de Barcelona, Barcelona (2020); ARGOS centre for audiovisual arts, Brussels (2020);

Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2020);

BAK – basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, Netherlands (2020); Luma Westbau, Zurich (2019);

Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London (2019); The Shed, New York (2019);

Kunsthall Bergen, Norway (2018); and REDCAT, Los Angeles (2012).

His work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art,

Pittsburgh; Centre Pompidou, Paris; FRAC Lorraine, Metz; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles;

Kunsthallen, Copenhagen; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art,

New York; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The

Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Wexner Center for the Visual Arts, Columbus; and the

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.

Ruth Estevez, Artist and Curator

Ruth Estevez is a curator, educator and set designer. She lives between NYC and Mexico City.  She was recently named director of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Previously, she was Artistic Director of Amant in Brooklyn (2020-2023), Senior Curator at The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University (2018-2020), and Co-Curator of the 34th São Paulo Biennial (2021). She also organized for several years the performance festival “Idiorrhythmic” at MACBA in Barcelona (2017-2020), and she was the Gallery Director and Curator at REDCAT/Calarts (2012-2018). She co-founded LIGA-Space for Architecture and Spatial Practices in Mexico City (2010-). She holds an MA in Art History (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, UNAM) and she is currently finishing her Ph.D. in Art, Education, and Research at the UCLM, Cuenca, focused on the aesthetic, social, and political shifts of collective creation in performance art, architecture and theater.

Alexandra Grant, Artist 

Alexandra Grant (b.1973, Ohio) lives and works in Los Angeles and Berlin. Grant explores the use of text and language in various media—painting, drawing, sculpture, film, and photography—probes ideas of translation, identity, dis/location, and social responsibility. Grant regularly collaborates with other artists, writers, and philosophers, resulting in creations that embody the synergy between words and visuals. She has exhibited at international institutions such as the Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, CA (2023); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA (2016); 20th Bienal de Arte Paiz, Guatemala City, Guatemala (2016); The Broad Museum at Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI (2014); The Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, MD (2007); and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles, CA (2007). Her work has been written about in the Los Angeles Times, White Hot Magazine, Frieze, Art in America, and Artforum amongst others. Awards include the COLA Individual Artist Fellowship and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Her works are included in museum collections such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa, CA; and the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX.

Kristen Hileman, Curator and Writer

An Independent Curator and former senior curator of the Baltimore Museum of Art and Hirschhorn Museum DC, lectures on the art market, its value, and new venues and channels for art platforms. She also served as the inaugural Curator-in-Residence at The Delaware Contemporary from 2019 to 2021. Her monographic exhibitions have brought new attention to influential female artists Anne Truitt, Maren Hassinger, and Jo Smail. She has realized major commissions with Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley, Sarah Oppenheimer, Tomás Saraceno, and others. Additionally, Hileman has organized exhibitions of the works of John Baldessari, Cai Guo-Qiang, Theresa Chromati, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Lizzie Fitch/Ryan Trecartin, Meleko Mokgosi, and John Waters.

Mia Yinxing Liu, Art Historian 

Mia Yinxing Liu is an art historian and a film and media historian. She has widely published on Chinese modern art, cinema, and histories of photography in East Asia. Her first book The Literati Lens: Wenren Landscape in Chinese Cinema (1950-1979) (University of Hawai’i Press, 2019) discusses how landscape in Chinese feature cinema in Maoist era were fields of contesting visions. Currently she is completing a book manuscript on the intermedial dialogues between ink painting and photography in modern China. Her research has received many awards, including Postdoctorate Fellow at Yale University, Taiwan Fellow, and Getty residential scholar at Getty Research Institute. She is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art at Johns Hopkins University.

Yuri Stone, Glenstone Museum Curator - Adjunct Faculty

Curator at Glenstone Museum in Potomac, where he works with artists to realize exhibitions, outdoor installations, and publications. From 2016-2019, he was the Assistant Curator at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, the contemporary art museum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts and prior worked as Program Associate at The Renaissance Society, an institution for contemporary art at the University of Chicago . His writing has appeared in art periodicals such as Flash Art International, Art Review, Art Papers, and others.