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There’s no denying that leaders of arts organizations spend a lot of time talking about their vision—would that these goals for the future were always so legible to those around them. Thankfully, the Museum of the African Diaspora‘s chief of curatorial affairs and public programs Key Jo Lee, who has held the position since January 2023, shares crystal-clear views of that which lies ahead.
There’s never been anyone like Lee at the museum—literally, the position was created especially for her. At the time of her appointment, a press statement specified that her charge was to “elevate the museum’s presence as a global leader within the contemporary art world in presenting and celebrating art from a uniquely African Diasporic perspective.” A heady responsibility to be sure, but it’s exactly what Lee has done since her arrival, fresh off a stint as associate curator of American art at the Cleveland Museum of Art. She is also the author of Perceptual Drift: Black Art and an Ethics of Looking, and a PhD candidate in art history and African American studies at Yale University.
The first group show that Lee curated at the museum, Unruly Navigations, featured 22 works by the artists that, true to the name of the exhibition, conjure ungovernable, complex visions of diaspora. Visitors thrilled to works like Jamaican artist Nadine Natalie Hall‘s hand-molded paving blocks of coconut, water, sugar, and peanuts; and Nafis M. White‘s beautiful selection of crystal jars filled with black licorice, a candy that most people either love or hate.
Her next curatorial offering, Liberatory Living: Protective Interiors & Radical Black Joy, opening in early October, will be the first MoAD exhibition to focus on design, through wallpaper, craft objects, and furniture. Lee organized the show around feminist theorist bell hooks’ concept of “homeplace” and scholar Elizabeth Alexander’s ideas of the Black interior.
Lee oversees the museum’s unique Emerging Artist Program, whose participants are featured in their own solo show at the museum, and connected to a stipend with which to carry out their work. The program has already helped to launch the careers of artists like Cheryl Derricotte and Andrew Wilson and is behind the recent exhibition of Zekarias Musele Thompson’s multimedia The Meeting Place. Lee makes sure participants shine under an appropriately bright spotlight, inviting them to VIP events and even taking a group to the Venice Biennale.
MUSEUM OF THE AFRICAN DIASPORA 685 Mission, SF. More info here.
