MCA finds its new chief curator.
Miranda Lash’s curatorial exhibitions bring attention to work by women, Lgbtq-identifying artists and artists of color
Miranda Lash will start her new role in September. Her exhibitions have brought attention to work by women, Lgbtq-identifying artists and artists of color.
Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art announced Thursday that Miranda Lash will take over as chief curator starting in September.
Lash, currently curator of contemporary art at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Ky., replaces Nora Burnett Abrams who was promoted last August to the MCA’S executive director job.
Lash has a long resume, assembling more than 30 museum exhibitions over her career, including showcases of established names, ranging from Mel Chin to Rashaad Newsome to the late Bruce Conner.
But she is probably best known for her role in producing group exhibitions, most notably “Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art,” a landmark survey she co-curated with Trevor Schoonmaker in 2016.
That exhibition, which toured major U.S. galleries, challenged the narrow definition many people hold of art created in and about the South by connecting a diverse lineup of 60 artists, including Ebony G. Patterson, Dario Robleto, Catherine Opie, Jeffrey Gibson, William Eggleston and Mel Chin.
The online magazine Hyperallergic, at that time the exhibition world’s most influential publication, praised the show as “a revolutionary exploded diagram of Southern Identity.”
In an interview, Lash said she hopes to continue exploring regional themes in her new position at the MCA as she becomes acquainted with the Colorado art scene. She’ll work to spotlight local talent while continuing to have an international outlook in her exhibition-making.
“That’s not to say that every show I create will be about Denver specifically, but I want Denver to inform the program in some way, either conceptually or directly,” she said.
She’s also ready to help the museum as it responds to the immediate concerns of social equity raised by Black Lives Matter and other consciousnessraising movements.
“I really believe there’s an important role for the museum to play as a space of new ideas and of healing at a time when it’s needed more than ever,” she said.
Lash’s curatorial efforts have consistently brought attention to work created by women, Lgbtq-identifying artists and artists of color.
“Art is such a powerful, open-ended language,” she said. “In a way, it’s the language that is most appropriate to take on some of the hardest questions in society.”
Lash said one of the things that attracted her to the MCA post is Denver’s large and growing Latino population.
She’s Mexican-american and grew up in a bilingual household in Los Angeles, and her curatorial platform includes bringing Latino artists into public view.
“I feel excited knowing that I can make that a part of my goals and know that it has a relationship to the demographics of Denver,” she said. “I can present shows of Latinx artists and know that there’s an audience in the city that will find a point of connection to that.”
The curator is also known for producing programming that goes beyond the objects installed on gallery walls. “Southern Accent,” for example, was accompanied by a concert series, a symposium on Confederate monuments and other activities.
That broad understanding of how a contemporary art museum can serve its community in 2020 and beyond was an important consideration in adding her to the team, said the MCA’S Abrams.
“The MCA is a tricky place. We’re not like any other, non-collecting contemporary art museums, which is to say, we care so much about contemporary culture at large,” said Abrams.
By that she means the MCA, while a national leader in exhibition creation, is also known for its popular parties, concerts, lectures and other “weird, nerdy, quirky programming that may have nothing to do with the exhibitions on view,” as Abrams puts it.
As a job candidate, Lash stood out because “she already had put into practice so much of what we have put into practice,” said Abrams.
Lash received her B.A. in art history and architecture from Harvard University
and her M.A. in art history from Williams College. Before her time at the Speed Museum, Lash was the New Orleans Museum of Art’s first curator of modern and contemporary art. She’s deeply involved in the curatorial field as a researcher and writer with essays appearing in numerous journals, and she serves on the board of the influential Joan Mitchell Foundation, based in New York.
But her curatorial focus remains on producing exhibitions that explore serious subjects in ways that make each of them attractive to the public, and easy to understand.
“I basically imagine taking my family through the gallery,” she said. “How can I talk about this in a way that anyone can access it, even if it’s tough?”
“I’m not a believer in dumbing down ideas,” she said. “I think the best way you can serve people is by giving them everything, but speaking clearly and accessibly.”