Baltimore Museum of Art Hires Two Curators of Contemporary Art—and More from October 28, 2019 -ARTnews

Jessica Bell Brown.

TEXAS ISAIAH

Monday, October 28, 2019

Baltimore Museum of Art Hires Two Curators of Contemporary Art
The Baltimore Museum of Art in Maryland has appointed Jessica Bell Brown and Leila Grothe as associate curators of contemporary art. Brown most recently worked as the consulting curator at Gracie Mansion Conservancy in New York, where she organized the ongoing exhibition “She Persists: A Century of Women Artists in New York, 1919-2019.” Brown has previously served as the museum research consortium fellow in the department of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, and she has also held positions at the nonprofit Creative Time and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. She is currently completing her Ph.D. on “post-war abstraction in the post-civil rights decade” at Princeton University. Grothe has been associate curator at the Wattis Institute at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco since 2014, working with artists like Rosha Yaghmai, Yuki Kimura, and Melanie Gilligan. She has also held the position of director for curatorial affairs at the 500 Capp Street Foundation in San Francisco, and managed the Alexandra Bowes collection and the Joyner/Giuffrida collection. Both Brown and Grothe will join the BMA on November 18.

Newark Museum Names New Deputy Director of Education and Audience Engagement
Silvia Filippini Fantoni has joined the Newark Museum in New Jersey as deputy director of education and audience engagement. Fantoni has been the director of programs and audience engagement at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh for the past two years, and she also has experience working at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (now known as Newfields) in Indiana, the British Museum, and the Sorbonne. In her new post, Fantoni will develop educational and community programs. “Community engagement, especially in the museum industry, is my personal and professional passion,” she said in a statement, “and I cannot wait to contribute my skills, ideas, and energy at this wonderful institution.”