The Scholars Speak II

Camille Brown is an Associate Curator at The Phillips Collection in Washington DC. She curated the exhibition Essex Hemphill: Take care of your blessings (2025), and co-curated Where We Meet: Selections from the Howard University Gallery of Art and The Phillips Collection (2024), and Pour, Tear, Carve: Material Possibilities in the Collection (2023). Brown has coordinated exhibitions including Lou Stovall: The Museum Workshop (2022), and the DC presentation of African Modernism in America, 1947–67 (2023). Brown has worked in the curatorial departments of the Norton Simon Museum of Art in Pasadena, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She holds degrees from Loyola University in New Orleans and New York University.

Dr. Adrienne L. Childs is an independent scholar, art historian, and curator. She is Senior Consulting Curator at The Phillips Collection. Her current book is an exploration of Black figures in European decorative arts entitled Ornamental Blackness: The Black Figure in European Decorative Arts, published by Yale University Press. She is currently curating Beauford Delaney: So Much Love and Beauty for The Phillips Collection and Jubilee: Celebrating 25 Years of the Driskell Center. She was recently co-curator of Out of Many: Reframing an American Art Collection and Vivian Browne: My Kind of Protest for The Phillips Collection. She was the guest curator of Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition at The Phillips Collection in Washington DC, 2020. In 2022 Childs won the Driskell Prize for achievement in African American art history.   

Dr. Tuliza Fleming is the Curator of American Art at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), Smithsonian Institution. She received her MA and PhD in American art history from the University of Maryland, College Park (1997 and 2007), and her BA from Spelman College (1994). During her tenure at the NMAAHC, she worked to build the museum’s foundational American art collection, supervised the creation of a collection-based multi-media interactive, co-curated the traveling exhibition, Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing: How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment, and served as the lead curator for the museum’s inaugural exhibition, Visual Art and the American Experience. Formerly, Dr. Fleming served in the position of Associate Curator of the American Art at The Dayton Art Institute in Dayton, Ohio.

Since 1996, Dr. Fleming curated over 20 exhibitions and worked and/or consulted for a variety of museums and cultural institutions. Her publications include, “Visual Art and the American Experience: Creating an Art Gallery in a History and Culture Museum,” Art and Public History: Approaches, Opportunities, and Challenges (Rowan and Littlefield, 2017); “Cover Stories: The Fusion of Art and Literature During the Harlem Renaissance,” Dream a World Anew: The African American Experience and The Shaping of America (Smithsonian Books, 2016); “The Convergence of Aesthetics, Politics and Culture: Jeff Donaldson’s Wives of Shango,” AfriCOBRA: Philosophy (The University of Chicago, 2013); “It’s Showtime! The Birth of the Apollo Theater,” Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing: How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment (Smithsonian Books, 2010); “The ‘Museum Baby’ Grows Up: Being a Curator of Color in a Monochromatic Art Museum World,” Museum News (July/August 2005); and, Breaking Racial Barriers: African American Portraits in the Harmon Foundation Collection (Pomegranate Press, 1997).

Dr. Melanee C. Harvey-Fryar is associate professor of art history in the Department of Art in the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts at Howard University. She earned a BA from Spelman College and pursued graduate study at Boston University where she received her MA and PhD in American Art and Architectural History. In addition to serving as coordinator for the art history area of study at Howard, she served as programming chair for the James A. Porter Colloquium on African American Art and Art of the African Diaspora at the university from 2016 to 2025. 

She has published on architectural iconography in African American art, Black Arts Movement artists, religious art of Black liberation theology and ecowomanist art practices. Melanee was in residence as the Paul Mellon Guest Scholar at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art during the 2020-2021 academic year. In 2023, she was awarded the Genevieve Young Fellowship in Writing by the Gordon Parks Foundation. She is the curator of Wherever There is Light (Fall 2024, TILT: The Center for the Contemporary Image, Philadelphia, PA), Gordon Parks: Pastor E.F. Ledbetter and Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church (Spring-Summer 2025, The Gordon Parks Foundation Gallery, Pleasantville, NY) and Temples of Hope, Rituals of Survival: Gordon Parks and Black Religious Life (Fall 2025), Howard University Museum, Dorothy Porter Room, Washington, DC). She is the author and editor of the accompanying exhibition catalogs for Wherever There is Light (2025) and Gordon Parks: Pastor E.F. Ledbetter and Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church (Fall 2025). Melanee is currently writing her first book entitled, Patterns of Permanence: African Methodist Episcopal Architecture and Visual Culture. 

Dr. Jordana Moore Saggese is Professor of Modern and Contemporary American Art at the University of Maryland, College Park and the former Editor-in-Chief of the College Art Association’s Art Journal. She was previously Associate Professor of Contemporary Art & Theory at California College of the Arts.

Across Dr. Saggese’s research projects there is an investment in the line between popular and critical cultures. This investment manifests in the subjects and methodologies of her research, which draw equally from visual culture studies and the traditional history of art, as well as in the dissemination of findings across both academic and general audiences. Dr. Saggese’s art history capitalizes on the cultural appeal of the popular to speak back to the exclusionary tactics of cultural institutions while also making connections between pop culture and the reality of life in the United States. 

She is an internationally recognized expert on the work of the American painter Jean- Michel Basquiat (1960-88). She has published two books on his life and work: Reading Basquiat: Exploring Ambivalence in American Art (UC Press, 2014) and The Jean-Michel Basquiat Reader: Writings, Interviews, and Critical Responses (UC Press, 2021). Professor Saggese has also published essays and reviews in The International Review of African-American Art, Nka: The Journal of Contemporary Art, exposure, Khan Academy, and Artforum. Her most recent book, Heavyweight: Black Boxers and the Fight for Representation, was published by Duke University Press in August 2024.

Dr. Dalila Scruggs is the Augusta Savage Curator of African American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She has held curatorial and museum education positions at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Brooklyn Museum, and the Williams College Museum of Art. As an educator, she co-designed and co-facilitated Art & Empathy: Community Care through Art, a virtual program that gathered participants from around the world during the darkest days of the pandemic. As a curator, she has curated or co-curated a number of exhibitions, including Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All that It Implies (2024), Visibilidad & Resistencia: New Acquisitions, Contemporary Afro-Mexican Photography (2024), Revolution! Works from the Black Arts Movement (2014), African Americans and the American Scene, 1929-1945 (2012).