Navigating Change in the Museum: Mining the Dirty in the Dirty South

The next lecture in the ASU-LACMA Navigating Change in the Museum lecture series is “Mining the Dirty in the Dirty South” by Valerie Cassel Oliver. This lecture provides an overview of an arch of curatorial practice that has culminated in the creation of the exhibition "The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture and the Sonic Impulse."

Valerie Cassel Oliver is the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Valerie Cassel Oliver is the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Previously, she was Senior Curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2000–17). At CAMH, Cassel Oliver organized numerous group and solo exhibitions including "Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970 (2005)" and "Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art (2012)."  At the VMFA, she has presented "Howardena Pindell: What Remains to be Seen (2018)," co-organized with Naomi Beckwith; "Cosmologies from the Tree of Life:Art from the African American South (2019)" and most recently, the acclaimed exhibition "The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture and the Sonic Impulse," on tour through 2023. Cassel Oliver is the recipient of numerous awards including the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence (2022); The Alain Locke International Award (2022); The James A. Porter Book Award (2019); and The David C. Driskell Award (2011) among others.

Moderator: Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Program Director, ASU-LACMA Master's Fellowship in Art History, School of Art Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, Arizona State University and Art Faculty Associate - Museum Heritage Studies.