ST. LOUIS, May 17, 2021—Nichole N. Bridges has been promoted to Morton D. May Curator of the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas, the Saint Louis Art Museum announced today.
Since joining the museum in 2013, Bridges has curated a number of exhibitions, including “Currents 109: Nick Cave” (2014) and “Adorning Self and Space: West African Textiles” (2015), and she served as in-house curator for the main exhibitions “Atua: Sacred Gods from Polynesia” (2014) and “Senufo: Art and Identity in West Africa” (2015). Bridges, an art historian of African art, also guest curated the reinstallation of the Cincinnati Art Museum’s collection galleries for African art, which reopened in 2016.
Bridges recently transformed how visitors experience the museum’s rich collection of Oceanic art through a significant renovation of a suite of galleries that will reopen this week. She curated this effort in collaboration with subject expert Philippe Peltier. Opening at the same time is a special installation of Australian Aboriginal art co-curated by Bridges and Alexander Brier Marr, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Assistant Curator for Native American Art in the department overseen by Bridges.
“Nichole has made prolific contributions to the museum,” said Brent R. Benjamin, the Barbara B. Taylor Director of the Saint Louis Art Museum. “In 2018, she refreshed the museum’s presentation of African art. With this year’s Oceanic installation, she offers our visitors new ways of seeing and thinking about these important aspects of the Art Museum’s comprehensive collection.”
Prior to joining the museum, Bridges was associate curator at the Newark Museum and head of the Department of the Arts of Africa, the Americas, Asia, and the Pacific Islands at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Bridges holds a bachelor’s degree in fine arts (art history) and French from Amherst College in Amherst, Mass., and a master’s degree and a doctorate in art history from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
CONTACT: Matthew Hathaway, 314.655.5493, matthew.hathaway@slam.org
