Advancing Change—Globalizing Museums for the Future

About the program

The panel will discuss themes and topics relevant to museums as they envision, transform, and reframe their approaches to engaging global audiences. The speakers will share innovative strategies their institutions are employing to promote equitable practices in collection exhibitions, programming, and community engagement.

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.

Welcome and opening remarks

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. Franklin redesigned the Romare Bearden Graduate Museum Fellowship, which now serves as a national model for increasing leadership and staffing in cultural institutions. She writes “Artful Message,” a regular art-education column for the St. Louis American newspaper. Franklin holds a master’s degree in education and a master’s of business administration degree from Webster University.

About the keynote speaker

Denise Murrell is the Merryl H. and James S. Tisch Curator at Large at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She curated The Met’s 2024 exhibition The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism and was the editor of its catalogue.

She previously curated the 2018 exhibition Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Now, as the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Research Scholar at Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery, and co-curated its expansion as Le modèle noir de Géricault à Matisse (The Black Model from Géricault to Matisse), in 2019 at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

Murrell has taught art history at Columbia University in New York and in Paris and has lectured and published extensively in the US and Europe on art of the 19th through 21st centuries. She received a doctorate in art history in 2014 from Columbia University.

About the panelists

Maggie Brown-Peoples is the Saint Louis Art Museum’s 2024-2026 Romare Bearden Graduate Museum Fellow. She is a 2020 graduate of the University of Missouri-Columbia (Mizzou) with a double major in communication and psychology and a minor in Black studies. In 2023, she graduated from the University of Kansas with a master’s degree in museum studies. She has provided curatorial, educational, and public programming support for the National Blues Museum, Spencer Museum of Art, and Watkins Museum of History. As a graduate student, she served as a curatorial assistant on the art exhibition component, “One History, Two Versions,” to supplement the traveling exhibition Emmett Till & Mamie Till-Mobley: Let The World See, which won the History in Progress (HIP) Award from the American Association for State and Local History.

Danielle Burns Wilson is the executive director and art director of Project Row Houses. She was the Romare Bearden Fellow from 2008–2009. She served from 2010–2013 as curator at the Houston Museum of African American Culture (HMAAC). Following that, she served as chief curator at the Houston Public Library and manager of the African American Library at the Gregory School. At the Gregory School, Wilson organized The Whole World Was Watching: Civil Rights–Era Photographs from Edmund Carpenter and Adelaide de Menil with Michelle White of the Menil Collection during her tenure. In 2018, she opened Chasing Perfection: The Work and Life of Architect John S. Chase, which traveled to the University of Texas School of Architecture in 2019. Wilson’s first show as curator at Project Row Houses was Artist Round 53: The Curious Case of Critical Race . . . Theory?

Alexis Assam is the Regenia A. Perry Assistant Curator of Global Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA), where she is co-curating the forthcoming exhibition Pop to Present: American Art from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Assam joined the museum in late 2021 and organized the Richmond presentation of the traveling survey exhibition Whitfield Lovell: Passages (2023). Prior to the VMFA, she worked at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as the Constance E. Clayton Curatorial Fellow (2019–2021), where she supported contemporary permanent collection rotations, acquisitions, commissions, and exhibitions, including the Philadelphia presentation of Senga Nengudi: Topologies (2021). Prior to her time at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Assam worked as the Romare Bearden Graduate Museum Fellow at the Saint Louis Art Museum (2018–2019), where she co-curated The Shape of Abstraction: Selections from the Ollie Collection (2019). Assam holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in art history with honors from Florida State University. 

Charlie Farrell is a curator, researcher, and writer based in St. Louis. Centering connection and resource-sharing, her practice aims to highlight the innate humanity we share. She is currently the assistant curator at Counterpublic, a triennial exhibition reimagining the possibilities of art in public life. In the past, she served as the 2022–2024 Romare Bearden Graduate Museum Fellow at the Saint Louis Art Museum. While there, she worked with the development, learning and engagement, and curatorial departments on various projects. Two of the projects included curating Wangechi Mutu: My Cave Call and Romare Bearden: Resonances; both opened in 2024. She has also held positions at the Miami Museum of Contemporary Art of the African Diaspora (MoCAAD) and the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art—both in Florida.