ASU-LACMA Navigating Change in Museums lecture series | Expanding the Stage: Performance, Presence and the Public Life of Art at the Whitney Museum with Adrienne Edwards, PhD

with Adrienne Edwards, PhD, Engell Speyer Family Senior Curator and Associate Director of Curatorial Programs at the Whitney Museum of American Art

Sept. 16 | 6–7 p.m. | Grant Street Studios, Atrium Lobby

Edwards will discuss thematic and solo exhibitions, a public art project, commissions and permanent collection strategies for the interdisciplinary projects she has realized at the Whitney Museum over nearly a decade that question and expand our understanding and experience of what is performance art.  Artists discussed will include Alvin Ailey, David Hammons, Every Ocean Hughes, Ralph Lemon, Dave McKenzie, Jason Moran, My Barbarian, Wu Tsang and Tosh Bosco, and others from the 2022 Whitney Biennial. 

Speaker bio

Adrienne Edwards is the Engell Speyer Family Senior Curator and Associate Director of Curatorial Programs at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Professor of Practice at Arizona State University. Edwards has been a curator at the Whitney since 2018. From 2021–2024, she also served as the Whitney’s Director of Curatorial Affairs. In 2022, she was the President of the International Jury of the 59th Venice Biennale, as well as a jury member for the 40th anniversary edition of Videobrasil in 2023 and the selection committee for the curatorship of the Berlin Biennale in 2018. Prior to the Whitney, Edwards served as curator of Performa in New York City and as Curator at Large for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where she oversaw the Mellon Interdisciplinary Initiative. In addition to over fifty commissions in film, performance and the visual arts, Edwards’s curatorial projects have also included the thematic intergenerational and interdisciplinary exhibition and catalogue “Blackness in Abstraction” presented at Pace Gallery (2016); the traveling exhibition and catalogue “Jason Moran” at the Walker Art Center, ICA Boston and Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (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 at the Whitney; Dave McKenzie's first solo museum exhibition in New York City “The Story I Tell Myself” and its pendant performance commission “Disturbing the View” (2021) at the Whitney; the performance collective My Barbarian's twentieth anniversary exhibition and catalogue (2021–22) at the Whitney and ICA LA; “Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept”; the blockbuster exhibition “Edges of Ailey” (2024-25); and “Grace Rosario Perkins: Circles, Spokes, Zig Zags, Rivers,” the artist’s first museum exhibition in New York City (2025-2026). She was part of the Whitney's core team for David Hammons’s public art monument “Day’s End.” Edwards has taught art history, performance and visual studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, New York University and the New School, and she has contributed essays to academic journals, artist monographs, group exhibition catalogs and art magazines as well as other publications. She holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University