ST. LOUIS, Aug. 4, 2025—The Saint Louis Art Museum will host its annual free virtual summit in September focusing on museums and their varied approaches to engaging global audiences. The summit will include a panel discussion and a keynote address by Denise Murrell, a curator from The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The event, Advancing Change—Globalizing Museums for the Future, begins online at 10 am on Sept. 18. Registration is required.
Min Jung Kim, the Barbara B. Taylor Director of the Saint Louis Art Museum, and Renée Brummell Franklin, the museum’s chief diversity officer, will welcome participants and provide opening remarks at this year’s summit.
Denise Murrell, the Merryl H. and James S. Tisch Curator at Large at The Met, curated the 2024 Met exhibition “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism.” She previously curated “Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Now” at Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery and “Le modèle noir de Géricault à Matisse” (The Black Model from Géricault to Matisse) 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 U.S. and Europe on art of the 19th through 21st centuries. She received a doctorate in art history in 2014 from Columbia University.
In a panel discussion, three alumnae of SLAM’s Romare Bearden Graduate Museum Fellowship will discuss best practices for nurturing diverse talent in museums and cultural institutions. The alumnae panelists are Danielle Burns Wilson, the executive director and art director of Project Row Houses in Houston, Texas; Alexis Assam, the Regenia A. Perry Assistant Curator of Global Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; and Charlie Farrell, the assistant curator at Counterpublic, a triennial exhibition in St. Louis. Maggie Brown-Peoples, SLAM’s 2024-2026 Romare Bearden Graduate Museum Fellow, will moderate the discussion.
Advancing Change, launched in 2021, is inspired by SLAM’s Romare Bearden Graduate Museum Fellowship, which started more than 30 years ago and is one of the nation’s longest-running postgraduate training opportunities for museum professionals from historically underrepresented populations. More than 90 percent of past fellows still work in the arts and cultural sector; the summit provides an opportunity for Bearden alums to discuss how they continue to be changemakers in their fields.
CONTACT: Molly Morris, 314.655.5250, molly.morris@slam.org
Denise Murrell, courtesy of Eileen Travell, The Metropolitan Museum of Art