The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia has named Connie H. Choi as chief curator and vice president for art and education, the latter being a newly created position. She succeeds Nancy Ireson, who held the title of chief curator and deputy director for collections and exhibitions and left the position in November. Choi begins at the Barnes on September 8.
Choi is currently curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she has worked for nearly a decade. At the Studio Museum, she worked closely with Thelma Golden, its director and chief curator, to map out the museum’s curatorial vision, including its recent reopening last fall.
To inaugurate the new building, Choi served as lead curator for its collection hang, titled “From Now: A Collection in Context” and curated a survey of Tom Lloyd, who had received the Studio Museum’s very first exhibition. ARTnews’s Alex Greenberger described the Lloyd exhibition as “both a feat of scholarship—curator Connie H. Choi searched high and low for sculptures by Lloyd, some of which remain unfound—and a useful primer on an artist who bridged the gap between life and art.”
Other curatorial credits at the Studio Museum include “Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem” (2019–21), “Their Own Harlems” (2017–18), “Fictions” (2017–18), “Regarding the Figure” (2017), and “Infinite Blue” (2017). She also collaborated with the Studio Museum’s Learning and Engagement department on the Find Art Here initiative, which brought reproductions of Studio Museum–owned works to various parts of Harlem.
She won a Henry Allen Moe Prize for the catalog that accompanied “Black Refractions” and received a Center for Curatorial Research Fellowship in 2022. In addition to her curatorial work, she has taught art history courses at Barnard College, Columbia University, and New York University.
“The Barnes as an educational institution holds a particular resonance for me given my background in arts pedagogy, which I have employed in both museum spaces and higher education classrooms,” Choi said in a statement. “I am inspired by the Barnes’s progressive vision and excellence in arts and education and look forward to drawing on my spectrum of experience to support the incredible work of my new colleagues across many departments, and the institution at large.”
At the Barnes, Choi will be focused on shaping the museum’s “curatorial and educational vision in alignment with and reflecting the larger strategic goals of the institution” and overseeing “the curatorial, collections, conservation, registration, exhibitions, and research, interpretation, adult learning, and academic programs departments,” per a release. She will also continue to curate her own exhibitions and publish her research.
“In the interest of fostering greater synergies between our curatorial and conservation functions, and our research, interpretation, and adult education operations, I have merged these departments under Connie’s leadership,” Barnes executive director and president Thom Collins said in a statement. “Her impressive curatorial and scholarly achievements, and pioneering work relating to artists of the material histories and cultures of the African diaspora, make her uniquely prepared to lead the work of these important departments.”
