Black Art & Design

Explore the work of Black Creatives in the Art World

Black Art & Design is a space to explore the work of Emerging and Established Black Creatives in the Art World. 

Black Art & Design is a space to explore the work of Emerging and Established Black Creatives in the Art World.
Explore The Work Of Black Creatives In The Arts

Baltimore Museum Of Art Hires Art Historian Jessica Bell Brown as Curator Of Its Contemporary Art Department.

Brown joins the museum at a moment of widespread change as BMA places major emphasis on diversity, equity, and access.

Christopher Cox

 Photo: Texas Isaiah. Courtesy of the Baltimore Museum of Art.

The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) announced today that it has created two new staff positions in its contemporary art department. . Jessica Bell Brown, who most recently served as a consulting curator at the New York nonprofit the Gracie Mansion Conservancy, and Leila Grothe, who currently works as an associate curator at the Wattis Institute at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, have been appointed associate curators and will both assume their responsibilities on November 18.

Jessica Bell Brown is an art historian and writer based in New York. She is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton. Her project revisits Sam Gilliam, Joe Overstreet, and the painterly object in the post-civil rights decade. Bell Brown holds a B.A. in art history from Northwestern University. She is a Teach for America alumna and has worked in various programming and curatorial capacities at cultural institutions in New York City including Creative Time and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. She has published critical essays on contemporary artists, including Senga Nengudi, Eric Mack, and Wilmer Wilson, among others. She is currently the Mellon Museum Research Consortium Fellow in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art.