The BMA expands curatorial department for contemporary art
The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) has announced the appointment of Jessica Bell Brown and Leila Grothe as Associate Curators for Contemporary Art, expanding the museum’s contemporary department.
“In their work as curators, educators, and scholars, Jessica and Leila have both shown incredible prescience in bringing to light the voices and innovations of a wide range of artists spanning the 20th into the 21stcentury. Their diverse and complementary areas of research and passion for expanding our collective understanding of the relationship between art and society will prove essential to the BMA’s ongoing success,” said BMA Dorothy Wagner Wallis Director Christopher Bedford.
Prior to serving as the Consulting Curator at Gracie Mansion Conservancy in New York with First Lady Chirlane McCray (2018-2019), Jessica Bell Brown was the Museum Research Consortium Fellow in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art (2016-2017). There, she worked on the 2017 Robert Rauschenberg retrospective Among Friends, contributed to the museum’s publications, and co-founded a quarterly series of museum-wide gallery talks called #ArtSpeaks. Earlier in her career, she held positions at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (2013) and Creative Time (2012). Brown holds an M.A. in Art History from Princeton University and a B.A. in Art History from Northwestern. She is currently completing her Ph.D. on post-war abstraction in the post-civil rights decade at Princeton University.
In addition to her curatorial responsibilities as the Associate Curator at the California College of the Arts’ Wattis Institute in San Francisco(2014-2019), Leila Grothe has been a guest lecturer and advisor to the CCA Curatorial Practice graduate program. Previously, she worked as the inaugural Director for Curatorial Affairs for the 500 Capp Street Foundation (2015-2016). She has also served as the collections manager for the Alexandra Bowes Collection (2014-2015)and the Joyner/Giuffrida Collection (2013-2014), the Assistant Director of External Affairs at Southern Methodist University’s Meadows School of the Arts (2010-2012), and as a project manager for Creative Time in Dallas (2009-2010). Grothe holds an M.A. in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts and a B.A. in Art History with Honors from Southern Methodist University.
