Biography
Adrienne Edwards is a curator, scholar and writer whose work concerns visual, performance and cross-boundary art as well as histories, concepts, modes and methods of blackness.
Currently the Engell Speyer Family Curator and Curator of Performance at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Edwards has realised a number of interdisciplinary projects and commissions with a wide range of artists for Performa, where she was previously Curator (2010–2018). She has worked with Jonathas de Andrade, Yto Barrada, Chimurenga, Teju Cole, Kwani Trust, Ralph Lemon, Laura Lima, Dave McKenzie, Julie Mehretu and Jason Moran, Wangechi Mutu, Senga Nengudi, Lorraine O’Grady, Benjamin Patterson, Adam Pendleton and Yvonne Rainer, Pope.L, Tracey Rose, and Carrie Mae Weems. Among her special thematic presentations for the Performa Biennial are AFROGLOSSIA, Performa 17 (2017); Babylon Brazil, Performa 15 (2015) and Three Duets, Seven Variations, on the occasion of the New York tour of Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, Performa 13 (2013).
Edwards was also Curator at Large at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, US (2016–2018), where she organised Jason Moran’s first monograph and national touring exhibition, co-curated the permanent collection exhibition I am you, you are too and co-led a $1 million Mellon Foundation Interdisciplinary Initiative. Other curatorial projects include the inaugural Artist Award and Live program, ASSEMBLY, Frieze New York (2018) and the exhibition and catalogue Blackness in Abstraction, Pace Gallery, New York (2016). She has also been a contributor to numerous exhibition catalogues, artist monographs and art publications..
Edwards is a PhD candidate (ABD) in performance studies at New York University and a participant in the seminar and forthcoming anthology Black Modernisms at the National Gallery of Art’s Center for the Advanced Study of Visual Arts. She currently lives and works in New York.
SAF participation:
March Meeting 2019
