The Spring 2025 Graduate Art guest lecture series, organized by Jack Bankowsky

Adrienne Edwards

This event is free & open to the public. RSVP’s are not required.

See the full Spring 2025 Seminar schedule here.

Dr. Adrienne Edwards is the Engell Speyer Family Senior Curator and Associate Director of Curatorial Programs at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where her recent exhibition, Edges of Ailey, opened in September 2024. Having served as a curator at the Whitney since 2018, Edwards’ credits include the co-curation of the 2022 Whitney Biennial: Quiet as It’s Kept; Jason Moran, which traveled from the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA, and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2018–19); “Moved by the Motion: Sudden Rise” (2020), a series of performances based on a text co-written by Wu Tsang, boychild, and Fred Moten; Dave McKenzie's first solo museum exhibition in New York City, The Story I Tell Myself, with its pendant performance commission “Disturbing the View” (2021); and the performance collective My Barbarian's twentieth-anniversary exhibition (2021–22) which traveled to The Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA. From 2021-2024, Edwards also served as the Whitney’s Director of Curatorial Affairs, and she was part of the Whitney's core team for David Hammons’s public art monument, Day’s End. Prior to the Whitney, she was a curator at Performa in New York City and Curator at Large for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Edwards served as the President of the International Jury of the 59th Venice Biennale (2022), as well as on the jury for the 40th anniversary edition of Videobrasil (2023). She has taught art history, performance, and visual studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, New York University, and the New School, and her writing has appeared in numerous monographs, exhibition catalogues, journals, and magazines.

Image credits: My Barbarian, courtesy of Whitney Museum of American Art.

Support for this series is generously provided by the following: Jack Shear, Brenda R. Potter, Brendan Dugan, Lisson Gallery, Beth Rudin DeWoody, Sprüth Magers, BLUM, Hannah Hoffman, Alan Hergott, and David Kordansky

ArtCenter's Graduate Art program is based on intensive studio practice and rigorous academic coursework. The program is distinguished by its low faculty-to-student ratio that provides students with the attention and feedback they need to refine and achieve their artistic goals. Faculty and students are artists working in all genres—film, video, photography, painting, sculpture, performance and installation. A significant number of alumni have achieved national and international acclaim and often return to share their insights and expertise as visiting faculty and guest lecturers.