The curator-in-residence program was developed
in 2019 to broaden the museum’s dynamic exhibition program and vision
for the curatorial department by bringing experienced curators and
scholars to join the professional team. Each resident works in an
ongoing capacity to fulfill the museum’s mission and grow the
presentation of contemporary art in our region. As a vital member of the
professional team, residents help establish new regional and local
partnerships to increase the scope of our exhibition program through
innovative exhibitions and engaging projects. Working collaboratively
with TDC’s engagement team of staff curators and educators, the curator-in-residence will spend the next two years developing a
thought-provoking schedule of exhibitions with a focus on artists of
color.
Tiffany E. Barber is a scholar, curator and
critic of 20th- and 21st-century visual, new media and
performance art. Her work, which spans abstraction, Afrofuturism, dance,
fashion, feminism and the ethics of representation and aesthetic
criticism, focuses on artists of the Black diaspora working in the
United States and the broader Atlantic world. She is assistant professor
of Africana Studies and Art History at the University of Delaware. She
has completed fellowships at ArtTable, the Delaware Art Museum and the
University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute for
African-American and African Studies. During the 2021-2022 academic
year, Barber will be a postdoctoral fellow at the Getty Research
Institute.
Barber’s first project is to curate the
Platform Gallery, TDC’s public art program on the exterior of our
Riverfront Wilmington facility. The Platform Gallery features the work
of internationally recognized artists who have designed work to fit a
billboard scale. Barber has selected Los Angeles-based, South
African-born, painter Simphiwe Ndzube to fill her first program. Ndzube
constructs imaginary universes that address issues of identity and
history, power and political struggle, and globalization and freedom. He
draws from the twin realities of racial segregation and political
unrest—ongoing consequences of colonialism in South Africa— that have
affected his people since the 1940s.
“I am searching for
an understanding of existence, of why we’re here… these figures that I
create, traversing through these spaces, [are] looking for meaning,
looking for love, liberation, and freedom.” – Simphiwe Ndzube
Barber will also curate an exhibition for TDC's summer 2022
exhibition season, Play. "The works I've chosen for Play spotlight how
artists of African descent use humor, irreverence and innovation to
make sense of our rapidly changing world. All of the artists represent
the cutting edge of contemporary art, working across such mediums as
animation, virtual reality, abstraction, and figurative painting, among
others.
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