Curatorial Practices and Social Movements

Emory’s Visual Scholarship Initiative (VSI) highlights the role of curators in framing, portraying, and conveying visual images to the public. This event explores the relationship between curation and representation, particularly in exhibitions that convey counter-narratives, incite public awareness, or showcase overlooked issues of social importance. The VSI fosters dialogue between artists, curators, activists, and scholars about the social possibilities of public scholarship.

*Please note: Ms. Rujeko Hockley is no longer able to attend this event. 

Kevin Sipp:

Kevin Sipp currently works as the Project Coordinator for Gallery 72, a Municipal Art Space for the City of Atlanta Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs. Gallery 72 is dedicated to presenting stimulating, and thought provoking contemporary art and programs that focus on advancing Atlanta’s art offerings. Gallery 72 seeks to promote cutting-edge contemporary art, while extending opportunities to artists and art organizations to explore creative expression and compelling idea. Kevin Sipp is also a fine artist, independent scholar, and curator with expertise in printmaking, painting, sculpture and multi-media installation. 

Mora Beauchamp-Byrd:

Dr. Mora J. Beauchamp-Byrd is Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History and Curatorial Studies at Spelman College. Prior to that appointment, she was Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History in the Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University from 2014-2015. Beauchamp-Byrd completed a B.A. in Art History and an M.A. in Visual Arts Administration at New York University. She has also earned an M.A. in Art History from Columbia University. In 2011, she completed a Ph.D. in Art History at Duke University in the Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies.

An art historian, curator, and arts administrator, she served as Interim Executive Director at the New Orleans African American Museum of Art, Culture and History (NOAAM) prior to her Visiting Assistant Professor appointment at Duke. From 2008 through 2013, she served as Assistant Professor of Art History, Department of Art, and Curator of University Art Collections at Xavier University of Louisiana.

Andy Ditzler:

Andy Ditzler is a curator, musician, and interdisciplinary scholar based in Atlanta. He founded the Film Love cinema series and co-founded the idea collective John Q. He earned a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from Emory University, with a concentration in cinema curation, and was trained as a musician at Indiana University.

Alessandra Raengo:

Since receiving my PhD in Cinema Studies from New York University with a dissertation that focused on black vernacular theorizations of the visibility of race in American popular and visual culture, I have increasingly moved to a more theoretical approach to the intersection between race and the pictorial and digital turn. My main research question, for the past few years, has been how race – a visual system that still operates as a language of social relations – theorizes the ontology of images. Otherwise put, my research moves beyond concerns for how race is visually represented and focuses instead on how race represents the visual.  My work is therefore boldly interdisciplinary – spanning the fields of film studies, visual culture studies, critical theory, critical race theory, Marxist theory, and post-colonial theory – because race itself is a meta-disciplinary formation.  The book that reflects this research is titled On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value and is forthcoming in Darthmouth College Press’s series Interfaces. It has grown out of a series of conference papers (at SCMS, CSA, ACLA, SSA, World Picture and more), essays (in Adaptation and forthcoming in Camera Obscura ) and book chapters (in In the Very Beginning/At the Very End, The Ages of Cinema. Criteria and Models for the Construction of Historical Periods, Film’s Thresholds, Beyond Blackface, and forthcoming in Contemporary Black Cinema and On Not Looking).