Dr. Elyan Hill Named Guest Curator of African and African Diaspora Art at the Rose Art Museum

(Waltham, MA. November 2020) - The Rose Art Museum is thrilled to announce the appointment of Dr. Elyan Jeanine Hill as its guest curator of African and African Diaspora Art. Dr. Hill joined the Rose team in October 2020 and will work in close partnership with Dr. Gannit Ankori, Henry and Lois Foster Director and Chief Curator (interim) to curate the museum’s 60th anniversary collection exhibition.

Dr. Hill is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania and will join the Art History Department at Southern Methodist University as an assistant professor in 2021. Her scholarship focuses on visual culture and performance in Ghana, Togo, Benin, Liberia, and their Diasporas.

“I have been following Dr. Hill’s impressive scholarship since she completed her Ph.D. at UCLA and am beyond excited to partner with her as we conceptualize and mount our new exhibition,” Ankori noted. “Elyan’s work uncovers global histories of slavery, practices of female empowerment, and traces of collective memory embedded within cultural artifacts and practices. Her rigorous, multidisciplinary expertise is deep and nuanced, and I am confident she will make a transformative contribution to the Rose Art Museum.”

The Rose’s 60th anniversary show provides a unique opportunity to conduct original research that re-examines artworks brought into the collection over the last six decades. The show espouses a multivocal approach, replacing the traditional master narrative of western art history with diverse alternative narratives and new ways of seeing and experiencing art. The curatorial team will reinterpret iconic pieces by canonical artists alongside art created by underrepresented and emerging artists, thus creating exciting dialogues and producing new knowledge.

Many of the works collected by the Rose since its foundation in 1961 are by previously marginalized artists, among them, women, Black, Indigenous, and persons of color. Dr. Hill’s expertise in critical race and feminist theories will contribute to expansive interpretations of the collection, as well as innovative modes of display. 

“I am a Black feminist scholar, dance ethnographer, and professor of African and African Diaspora art history and material culture. My work interrogates geographies of choice, Black women’s history-making practices, and embodied renderings of the slave trade. As the Guest Curator of African and African Diaspora art at the Rose Art Museum, I anticipate working with the team to explore new avenues for mobilizing non-Western tactics of display and presenting diverse worldviews through attention to culturally specific constructions of gender and race.”

Generously funded by The Henry Luce Foundation, this significant, museum-wide exhibition will be on view for three years with several rotations. It will be accompanied by a major catalog that will echo and enhance the exhibition’s themes and concepts. Dr. Hill will contribute to the catalog as well.

The ambitious 60th anniversary show will be Dr. Ankori’s first exhibition since stepping into a leadership role at the Rose. Previously, she curated three Rose exhibitions with accompanying catalogs in 2012, 2015, and 2016. Dr. Ankori is perhaps best known for her innovative curatorial projects, in collaboration with Indigenous Mexican fashion curator Circe Henestrosa, most recently exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (2018), at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York (2019), and the De Young Museum in San Francisco (2020). Caitlin Julia Rubin, Associate Curator and Director of Programs at the Rose, is also a curatorial team member.

From her first day at the Rose, Gannit has committed the museum to robust and thoughtful DEIA work. She has already taken impactful steps toward diversifying the staff, board, collections, exhibitions, audiences, and programs. She has appointed Anthony DiPietro as the Rose’s inaugural DEIA partner in an effort to track, coordinate, assess, and amplify the DEIA path that lies ahead. The Rose team’s ultimate goal is to transform the museum into an antiracist museum, a nexus for art, communities, and justice.

 

ABOUT THE ROSE ART MUSEUM AT BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY

The Rose Art Museum has been dedicated to exhibiting and collecting modern and contemporary art at Brandeis University since 1961. With its highly respected international collection of more than 9,000 objects, scholarly exhibitions, and multidisciplinary academic and public programs, the Rose affirms and advances the values of freedom of expression, global diversity, and social justice that are the hallmarks of Brandeis University. The Rose Art Museum recently added works by Betye Saar, Joe Overstreet, Haris Epaminonda, Martine Gutierrez, and Pieter Vermeerschion to its permanent collection.

For more information,  call 781-736-3434. Follow the Rose Art Museum on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.