Portrait of Lowery Stokes Sims at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, by Emily Johnston for Artsy

Wednesday, April 19, 2017 - 5:30pm

Fisher-Bennett Hall, Room 401, 3340 Walnut Street, with reception to follow in Jaffe 104, 3405 Woodland Walk

Jill and John Avery Lecture in the History of Art - Lowery Stokes Sims, Curator Emerita at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York

"Image-Banking: A Life with Art and Artists," A Lecture by Lowery Stokes Sims

Throughout her career Lowery Stokes Sims collaborated with a generation of artists and arts administrators who forged the first determined efforts to break through institutional and societal exclusionary practices as they dealt with issues such as race, gender, sexual preference, social and economic justice. Image-Banking: A life with Art and Artists will chronicle these efforts by means of images of works by artists that have had an impact on Sims and exemplify her collaborations with her contemporaries to forge a more inclusive art world, and a determination to continue to pursue those goals in what seems to be an increasingly fractious global arena.

Lowery Stokes Sims, retired from the Museum of Arts and Design as Curator Emerita in 2015. Prior to her tenure at MAD (2007-2015) Sims served on the staff of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1972-2000), where after working in the Community Programs Department she became the first African American curator at the Museum. She then served as executive director, president and adjunct curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem (2000-2007) an institution dedicated to the promotion of diasporic Black art before joining the staff of MAD where she added craft and design to her purview.