Adrienne Edwards

Adrienne Edwards is the Engell Speyer Family Curator and Curator of Performance at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She has realized new cross-boundary work with a wide range of artists, including commissions with Edgar Arceneaux, Yto Barrada, Teju Cole, Juliana Huxtable, Rashid Johnson, Laura Lima, Julie Mehretu and Jason Moran, Wangechi Mutu, Adam Pendleton and Yvonne Rainer, and Tracey Rose in addition to projects and productions by Jonathas de Andrade, Chimurenga, Kwani Trust, Benjamin Patterson, Pope.L, Ralph Lemon, Senga Nengudi, Lorraine O’Grady, Dave McKenzie, Will Rawls, and Carrie Mae Weems for Performa, where she was Curator from 2010-2018. Edwards developed special thematic presentations within the Performa biennial, including “AFROGLOSSIA” (Performa 17), “Babylon Brazil” (Performa 15), and “Three Duets, Seven Variations” on the occasion of the New York tour of Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art (Performa 13). She also oversaw Performa’s institutional partnerships and co-commissioning relationships with Anthology Film Archives, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, and The Studio Museum in Harlem. As the Walker Art Center's Curator at Large from 2016-2018, Edwards organized Jason Moran’s first-ever monograph and touring exhibition, co-curated the permanent collection exhibition, I am you, you are too, and co-led a $1 million Mellon Foundation Interdisciplinary Initiative. Other curatorial projects have included the critically acclaimed exhibition and catalogue Blackness in Abstraction, hosted by Pace Gallery in 2016, and Frieze New York's inaugural Artist Award and Live program, "ASSEMBLY", in 2018. In addition to being a PhD Candidate in Performance Studies at New York University, she is a contributor to numerous exhibition catalogues and art publications, including Aperture, Art in America, Flash Art International, Parkett, Artforum.com, and Spike Art Quarterly. She is a board member at Danspace Project, Movement Research, and Kyle Abraham’s A.I.M.

Photo by Whitney Browne