The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) in San Francisco has named Essence Harden as senior curator. She will begin in the role on May 18.
Harden currently serves as curator of the Expo Chicago art fair. Since 2024, they have also organized the Focus section of Frieze Los Angeles. They will continue in those roles with YBCA’s support. As an independent curator, Harden most recently co-curated the 2025 edition of the Made in L.A. biennial at the Hammer Museum.
They previously served as visual arts curator at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles and have also organized exhibitions at the Orange County Museum of Art, Art + Practice in Los Angeles, the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, and the Oakland Museum of California.
A Bay Area native, Harden’s hiring represents a homecoming. In an emailed interview, Harden said they were drawn to YBCA because of its “history of experimentation and its understanding of contemporary art as part of a larger civic and cultural conversation.”
The role of senior curator, which sees them develop public programming and exhibitions, including the 2028 Bay Area Now triennial, offers “an opportunity to bring together many of the investments that have shaped my practice: scholarship, interdisciplinary collaboration, public engagement, and long-term relationships with artists,” they said.
“Essence rose to the top,” Mari Robles, YBCA’s chief executive, told ARTnews, noting their varied experience working in both museums and art fairs. “We’re looking to build out a bold, dynamic program, one that speaks both to the local, Bay Area community, as well as regionally and nationally. They made it clear that they had kind of that connective tissue to do that work.”
Robles said that she was especially drawn to Harden’s roots in the Bay Area and their years spent in Los Angeles and how they could bring those two scenes together in different ways via YBCA’s programming under a concept of the “identity of the West.”
“When I speak about the ‘identity of the West,’” Harden said, “I’m thinking about the West as an important spatial formation within contemporary art: a geography shaped by movement, speculation, cultural exchange, and uneven histories of visibility. Much of my work has considered how art happens in California, and how place is never only physical; it also carries memory, diasporas, imaginings, politics, and possibility.”
Robles joined YBCA about 16 months ago and has spent that time plotting the future of the 33-year-old organization, which is equally known for its visual arts and performing arts programs. “YBCA has a space that allows for a kind of nimbleness and flexibility,” she said. “We’re thinking boldly and expansively about our space, and how do we connect it to different audiences. We’re essentially looking to have this be a new era of YBCA that is connected to both this Bay Area identity and also thinks expansively about the West and internationally.”
In thinking about YBCA’s future, Harden added that they see it “as both rooted and expansive: grounded in the Bay Area’s artistic, political, and cultural histories, while also connected to broader regional, diasporic, and global conversations. I hope visitors encounter exhibitions and programs that are visually ambitious, intellectually rigorous, and open to complexity. I am interested in projects that give artists’ materials, processes, and forms room to unfold.”
