Explain some of the thinking around the work you made for your 2019-2020 residency at The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Artist-in-Residence exhibition at MoMA PS1, “This Longing Vessel”. In what ways did it explore the intersection of Blackness and queerness?
MHYSA: I started my residency at The Studio Museum in Harlem in October of 2019 along with artists Elliot Reed and Naudline Pierre. The AIR group show “This Longing Vessel” opened in December of 2020 at Ps1. I think Blackness and queerness interacted for each artist in the show in our own way and I can only really speak for myself. Being a Black and queer person, Black culture, and queerness as a way of being in the world always shape my lens. This is how I see the world and my art comes from how I interpret or dream about what I see. I think about Black women’s culture, what it means to be a Black femme, what it means to channel feminity in a Black body, to claim the signifier of the feminine, and what the tradit
Naomi Beckwith, who succeeds Nancy Spector, comes from the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and will help the museum work toward a more equitable work environment.
A New Era for a Modern Museum: The Guggenheim Names Naomi Beckwith Its New Deputy Director and Chief Curator
Photo: Nathan Keay for MCA Chicago, Heather Shimmin (Shutterstock)
For 84 years, New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum has represented the vanguard of modern art, an early champion of artists today, its nautilus shell-inspired structure houses artworks from generations of the world’s most visionary and experimental artists. Yet like many fine arts museums, for decades, the Guggenheim’s iconic spiral of galleries have proved a primarily Eurocentric domain in both artists and infrastructure.
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As such, the museum made headlines in 2019 when (