Contributing Curator. The Lighton International Artists Exchange Program promotes cross-cultural understanding and awareness through art and travel. I assisted program founder, artist Linda Lighton, in organizing “desire” to coincide with NCECA exhibits at the Belger Arts Center, Kansas City, MO
Co-curator with David Jackson. This exhibit celebrates “10 Years of GLAMA” and the growing collection of material culture documenting LGBTQIA communities in the Kansas City metropolitan area. We also document community outreach activities and published student research based in the collection. Each panel is 40 x 32”. Jackson and I, with Stuart Hinds, were the co-founders of GLAMA, where Hinds is still its curator for the University.
The Community Curator program of Kansas City Museum invited individual residents as well as historians and history educators to share their perspectives on artifacts they choose from the Museum collection. The program provided fresh insight about artifacts and collections of Kansas City Museum and Union Station, and welcomed diverse input from the Kansas City community.
Curator. This exhibit was a collaboration with donor Allan Gray, the Black Archives of Mid-America where I was a member of the board, Kansas City Museum, where I was director, and Kansas City Friends of Alvin Ailey. This invaluable collection of composition notebooks and diaries, papers, scripts, study notebooks and photographs detail the minutiae of an emerging, then established, dance company. In the exhibit, next to details of conversations with famous persons are notes on costumes; alongside abstract stage directions are encouraging notes to dancers and friends. This trove, entrusted by Mr. Ailey to Mr. Gray, and here presented for the first time, reveals touching and subtle dimensions of one of the most accomplished creative artists of the 20th century.
Founding Co-Curator. Nuestra Herencia was founded with an inaugural grant from the National Trust for Historic Preservation to collect, preserve and create access to the documents and artifacts that record Kansas City’s Latino/a communities throughout the city’s history.
A major initiative of Nuestra Herencia was the exhibit “Musica es mi primer amor: The Lupe Gonzalez Orchestra.” The presentation mined the Gonzalez family archive to explore Mexican-American culture in mid-century Kansas City through the lens of a musician, family man and community activist.
Curator. This large-panel exhibit accompanied a presentation of a national touring show about the Titanic. The assemblage of images of archival materials and artifacts broadly illustrates life in Kansas City in the year 1912, when the great ship sunk on its maiden voyage. Each panel is 96 x 48”.
Co-curator with Sue Rowley. 25 artists working in a broad variety of textile media explore the shifting subtleties and contradictory assumptions at the foundations of personal, national and cultural identity.
Consulting Curator. The Michael Klein Collection at The Temple, Congregation B’nai Jehudah features Judaica in all media from Jewish communities around the world. Items date from the biblical era to the current day.
I assisted the donor and curator in photography, layout, design / production of exhibit elements, installation and labeling.