Asma Naeem: Salman Toor’s Brown Boys

Salman Toor mingles sensual pleasure with satire throughout his work and upends the conventions of European, American, and South Asian art history. His paintings offer evocative narrative fragments that reflect on colonial and immigrant experiences.

Join Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love curator and Baltimore Museum of Art director Asma Naeem for a virtual conversation exploring the exhibition and Toor’s “brown boys that mine the complexities of being an immigrant, queer and human.”

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Asma Naeem: Salman Toor's Brown Boys, 2024. Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University.

ABOUT THE CURATOR

Asma Naeem is the Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director at the Baltimore Museum of Art. She previously served as the Museum’s Eddie C. and C. Sylvia Brown Chief Curator at the BMA, and has organized exhibitions on the work of such artists as Candice Breitz, Isaac Julien, Salman Toor, and Valerie Maynard. Prior to the BMA, she was at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, where she presented, among other shows, an early career retrospective of the work of Titus Kaphar, and historical and contemporary exploration of the silhouette through the lens of gender, race, and technology. She has written widely on American art, contemporary art, the South Asian diaspora, and museum studies. Her book, Out of Earshot: Sound, Technology, and Power in American Art, 1847–1897, was published by University of California Press in 2020.

This program is held in conjunction with the exhibition Salman Toor: No Ordinary Love, on view November 16, 2023–February 11, 2024.