Join Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art (Tephra ICA) every third Thursday for Art After Hours! Stop by the gallery for hors d'oeuvres, drinks, contemporary art, and conversation. On November 21, Art After Hours will feature contemporary art curator, Valerie Cassel Oliver, who will share insights on Tephra ICA's current exhibition Ebony G. Patterson: ...three kings weep....
Ebony G. Patterson has recently been awarded a 2024 MacArthur Fellowship.
Free and open to the public. This program is generously supported by Reston Community Center and Open Road Distillery.
Image: https://vmfa.museum/collections/curators/
Meet the Guest Speaker
Valerie Cassel Oliver is the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Prior to this position, she spent sixteen years at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas, where she was senior curator. She was director of the Visiting Artist Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a program specialist at the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2000, she was one of six curators selected to organize the Biennial for the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Cassel Oliver has organized numerous exhibitions including the acclaimed Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970 (2005), Cinema Remixed and Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image with Dr. Andrea Barnwell Brownlee (2009), Hand + Made: The Performative Impulse in Art and Craft (2010); and Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art (2012), which toured through 2015. Cassel Oliver has also mounted numerous solo exhibitions including a major retrospective on Benjamin Patterson, Born in the State of Flux/us, as well as the surveys Donald Moffett: The Extravagant Vein (2011); Jennie C. Jones: Compilation (2015); Angel Otero: Everything and Nothing (2016), and Annabeth Rosen: Fired, Broken, Gathered, Heaped (2017).
While at VMFA, Cassel Oliver has organized several special exhibitions including Howardena Pindell: What Remains To Be Seen (2018), Cosmologies from the Tree of Life: Art from the African American South (2019), The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse (2021) and Isaac Julien: Lessons of the Hour—Frederick Douglass (2022).
Biography from https://vmfa.museum/collections/curators/