(Detroit)—The Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) has hired Laurie Ann Farrell as curator and department head of contemporary art. In addition, Taylor Renee Aldridge and Lucy Mensah are joining the DIA as assistant curators in the contemporary art department.

“Contemporary art will play a vital role in connecting with our community, so it was critical to fully staff our contemporary art department,” said Salvador Salort-Pons, DIA director. “Laurie brings with her a strong track record of engagement and of building relationships with local artists. As a team, she, Taylor and Lucy will bring a renewed focus to our outstanding contemporary art collection and develop new projects and programs to create deeper connections between the museum and our community.”

Laurie Farrell

Farrell comes to the DIA from the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) where she was executive director of exhibitions initiatives. She directed exhibition programming for the SCAD Museum of Art and SCAD FASH, its museum of fashion and film, as well as the university’s galleries in Atlanta, Hong Kong and Lacoste, France. Farrell is currently an art consultant for the new Mercedes-Benz Stadium Art Collection in Atlanta and curator of the first Rolls-Royce art program in North America.

Farrell has curated exhibitions of work by a diverse group of prominent contemporary artists, among them Marina Abramovic, Doug Aitken, Carrie Mae Weems, Yinka Shonibare, Alfredo Jaar, Michael Joo, Sigalit Landau, Stephen Antonakos, Cao Fei, Kader Attia and Yeondoo Jung.

Farrell was curator of contemporary art at the Museum for African Art in New York City from 1998 to 2007, where she curated the exhibitions “Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art” and “Looking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora.”

In 2006, Farrell organized American participation at Angola’s inaugural Trienal de Luanda with support and funding from the U.S. Department of State. Farrell received the Abraaj Capital Art Prize with artist Kader Attia in 2010, the ArtTable New Leadership award in 2011 and the Southeast Museum Conference 2015 Museum Leadership Award. Farrell is widely published in art journals and has lectured throughout the Americas, Africa and Europe. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in art history from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a Master of Fine Arts in art history and theory from the University of Arizona.

Taylor Aldridge

Aldridge is a Detroit-based cultural critic, arts writer and curator who investigates the intersections of equity, race and culture in contemporary art. In 2015, along with Jessica Lynne, she co-founded ARTS.BLACK, an online publication of art criticism from black perspectives, predicated on the belief that art criticism should be an accessible dialogue—a tool to question, celebrate and talk back to the global world of contemporary art. 

Aldridge earned a master’s degree in liberal arts from Harvard University, with a concentration in museum studies and a Bachelor of Arts from Howard University with a concentration in art history and business administration. She has worked at the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art at Harvard and was awarded the Goldman Sachs Junior Fellowship at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

Lucy Mensah 

Mensah is currently a Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow in the modern and contemporary department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. She is a recent graduate of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, where she obtained her Ph.D. in English, with a focus on 20th-century African American literary and visual culture. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, and a Master’s in Cultural Studies from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburg. Mensah’s museum experience includes a research fellowship at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. and a curatorial internship at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville.