- Category
- Virtual event
Advancing Change: Centering Mentorship in Arts, Education, and Community
On Thursday, September 26th, 2024, the Saint Louis Art Museum held Advancing Change: Centering Mentorship in Arts, Education, and Community, focusing on the role of mentorship in fostering the next generation of leaders and defining strategies for creating space in museums, education, and community.
Portions of the virtual program were recorded and an archived version can be watched below.
About the summit
The Saint Louis Art Museum launched Advancing Change in 2021. The annual summit is devoted to addressing best practices for nurturing diverse talent within museums and cultural institutions. This program is inspired by more than 30 years of SLAM’s Romare Bearden Graduate Museum Fellowship, one of the nation’s longest-running postgraduate training opportunities for museum professionals from historically underrepresented populations.
Sessions and Speakers
Welcome and Opening Remarks
Min Jung Kim and Renée Brummell Franklin
Min Jung Kim and Renée Brummell Franklin
Min Jung Kim was named the Barbara B. Taylor Director of the Saint Louis Art Museum in 2021. She previously served as the director and chief executive officer of the New Britain Museum of American Art, deputy director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, and director of content alliances at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea. She graduated from Wheaton College and holds a master’s degree in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art at the University of London.
Renée Brummell Franklin, the chief diversity officer at the Saint Louis Art Museum, champions policies and programs to ensure that the Museum is a more welcoming, equitable, and inclusive institution. She has led the Museum’s efforts to initiate and cultivate sustainable relationships with diverse audiences to encourage participation in the arts for more than 20 years. Renée redesigned the Romare Bearden Graduate Museum Fellowship, which now serves as a national model for increasing leadership and staffing in cultural institutions. Renée writes “Artful Message,” a regular art education column for the St. Louis American newspaper. Renée holds a master’s degree in education and a master of business administration degree from Webster University.
Keynote
This portion of the summit was not recorded
Sarah Lewis
Sarah Lewis is the founder of Vision & Justice and the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.
She is the author of The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America, and The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery. She is the co-editor of the upcoming Vision & Justice book series, which developed from her award-winning “Vision & Justice” edition of Aperture magazine. She is also the editor of an anthology on the work of Carrie Mae Weems.
Lewis’s awards include the Infinity Award, the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, a Cullman Fellowship, the Freedom Scholar Award (ASALH), the Arthur Danto/ASA Prize from the American Philosophical Association, and the Photography Network Book Prize. Her writing has been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Artforum, and the New York Review of Books, and her work has been the subject of profiles from The Boston Globe and the New York Times. Lewis is a sought-after public speaker, with a mainstage TED talk that received more than 3 million views.
Lewis received a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University, master’s degrees from Oxford University and the Courtauld Institute of Art, and a doctorate from Yale University. She lives in New York City and Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Sarah Lewis. Photo by S. Rosner
Panel Discussion
Justice Henderson
Justice Henderson is the Saint Louis Art Museum’s 2023–2025 Romare Bearden Graduate Museum Fellow. She previously was an intern in the Ryan Learning Center and later, an adjunct lecturer at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she facilitated multigenerational tours for the public and organizations, including the Chicago Public Library and the Chicago Transit Authority. She was also a marketing intern for the Chicago Artists Coalition (CAC); she maintained social media accounts, coordinated artist’s studio visits, and managed and curated CAC’s booth at The Other Art Fair.
Henderson has a dual master of arts degree in arts administration and policy and modern and contemporary art history, theory, and criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She also has a bachelor of fine arts in studio art and a bachelor of arts in journalism from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. During her undergraduate experience, she was an interpretation intern at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, where she conducted surveys, wrote blog posts, and drafted wall texts for temporary exhibitions, such as Tempera and Men of Steel, Women of Wonder.
Justice Henderson
Rehema Barber
Rehema Barber is the director of curatorial affairs for the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts (KIA). In 2020, she helped plan and execute the reinstallation plan and theme for the KIA’s permanent collection. Since joining the KIA, notable exhibitions she has curated include Yun-Fei Ji: Tale Tales of Scavenger, Africa Imagined: Reflections on Modern and Contemporary Art, Todd Gray Crossing the Waters of Space, Time, and History, Unmasking Masculinity for the 21st Century (cocurator), A Bridge Between Two Worlds: Works by Wu Jian’an, and Kyungmi Shin: A Story to Finding Us.
Previously, Barber held positions at the Tarble Arts Center at Eastern Illinois University, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Memphis, among others. She has participated in the AICA-USA Art Writing Workshop sponsored by the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Getty Leadership Institute, the Japan Foundation Curatorial Exchange Program, and was a Saint Louis Art Museum Romare Bearden Fellow. Barber contributed to the catalogue for SLAM’s 2019 exhibition Shape of Abstraction, and her writing has appeared in The Commercial Appeal, Fiber Arts, International Review of African American Art, Number magazine, and the Routledge Reader series.
Rehema Barber. Photo by Mary Whalen
Jade Powers
Jade Powers is the Hugh Kaul Curator of Contemporary Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art. She directs the growth and development of the BMA’s contemporary art collection of more than 3,200 works and implements contemporary art exhibitions. Previously Powers was the curator of contemporary art at the Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville, Florida. There she spearheaded the reinstallation of community-favorite public sculpture, Hammering Man at 2,938,405 by Johnathan Borofsky; was the on-site curator for the exhibition Posing Beauty in African American Culture; and acquired over 20 new works to the collection, 95 percent of which are works by women and artists of color.
Prior to the Harn Museum, Powers served as the assistant curator at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri. Powers has been a visiting critic at Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Kansas, and the Kansas City Art Institute. She was a member of the inaugural class of the Professional Alliance for Curators of Color, an initiative of the Association of Art Museum Curators. She has been a featured writer in several catalogues, including 2019 Charlotte Street Visual Artists Awards, Dyani White-Hawk: Speaking to Relatives (2021), The Regional (2021), and Lamerol A. Gatewood (2021). Powers earned a master’s degree from Indiana University Bloomington and a bachelor’s degree from DePauw University.
Jade Powers
Joi Ellene Stampley-Whiley
Joi Ellene Stampley-Whiley is an experienced artist, art instructor, and arts administrator. Whiley has organized workshops at the LSU Museum of Art, presented an arts lecture at the East Baton Rouge Parish Library, and served as a teaching artist for the New Orleans Museum of Art. Previously, she served as a member of the advisory group for the exhibition Called to the Camera: Black American Studio Photographers at the New Orleans Museum of Art. She also works alongside her husband, Joseph Whiley, as co-owner of E. Joi Studio.
Whiley holds a bachelor of arts in studio art from Spelman College and a master of arts in arts administration from the University of New Orleans. She studied abroad at the SCAD Lacoste School of Art in southern France. Whiley has done advanced studio studies at Parsons School of Design. She has exhibited her work at M. Francis Gallery, the New Orleans Museum of Art during Artfully Aware, Baton Rouge Shaw Center Fourth Floor Terrace Gallery, and the New Orleans African American Museum.
Joi Ellene Stampley-Whiley