Museum and Exhibition Studies Welcomes Lucy Mensah

The UIC School of Art & Art History is excited to announce the newest addition to our faculty in Museum and Exhibition Studies.

Lucy Mensah comes to MUSE from the Detroit Institute of Arts, where she has worked as an assistant curator of post-1950 contemporary art. She recently co-curated the exhibition Making Home: Contemporary Works from the DIA, which includes work by Carrie Mae Weems, Glenn Ligon, and Lorna Simpson. Before working at the DIA, Mensah was a post-doctoral fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, where she researched the influences of African textiles in contemporary Afrofuturist art. Mensah holds a Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University, where she studied the impact of post-WWII urban renewal projects in the United States on the development of African American literary and visual representations of black masculinity. She also holds an M.A. in Literary & Cultural Studies from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.A. in English from Bucknell University. She has worked in varying capacities at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, the National Museum of American History in Washington D.C., and the Frist Art Museum in Nashville.

Her research interests include ways of challenging racist ideologies in the exhibition space, the history of radical curatorial practices, the role of post-industrialism in creating alternative art spaces, and ways of acknowledging embodiment and displaying empathy through curating.  

Lucy Mensah will be teaching 543: Writing for Exhibitions as well as a special topics seminar, soon to be announced!