Museums as Systems 2023 | Resources for Reimagination: Day One

McKenzie Grant-Gordon is a Jamaican American visual artist based in New York. She currently works at the Studio Museum as a Membership and Annual Giving Associate. Born and raised in Maryland, McKenzie is a passionate and driven artist whose practice is rooted in liberation and love. Her work explores a sense of nostalgia infused with fantasies of the future by speaking to notions of heritage, community, and transformation. She hopes her imagery cultivates space for herself and others to be reflected, respected, and empowered for generations to come. 

Alayah Glenn is a multi-hyphenate strategist and philanthropist who builds communities and capacity for visionary social impact with substance, strategy, and style. 

Glenn’s career began at Equal Justice Initiative, where she supported community research and donor engagement that led to the National Memorial on Peace and Justice. Building on that foundation, she would grow to lead high-impact fundraising and development initiatives like the Donors of Color Network, the Center for Economic Empowerment and Opportunity, and Project Liberty, also founding the Rushing River Giving Circle in 2020 to support community healing and strategic political transformation in the United States South. As Senior Development Officer at the Museum of Modern Art, Glenn now stewards and serves the Black Arts Council, a community dedicated to the visibility, access, and appreciation of art from the African Diaspora at MoMA and beyond. 

Glenn is an alumna of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, happily based in Harlem. 

Lisa Dent is an advocate for living artists and cultural workers. Her background includes work in film, theater, and the visual arts as a curator, gallerist, writer, production designer, and creative producer. Dent is currently the Director of Public Programs at Mass MoCA. Most recently, Dent was the Executive Director of Artspace New Haven, and the Director of Resources & Award Programs at Creative Capital (2012–17), where she led the financial and advisory services programs and advised artists toward the full realization of their projects. Prior to joining Creative Capital, Dent was Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Columbus Museum of Art, where she organized exhibitions including Stephanie Syjuco: Pattern Migration, Currents: Latifa Echakhch, and Supply & Demand. Dent was a Helena Rubenstein Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and held curatorial staff positions at the New Museum of Contemporary Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. From 2004 to 08, Dent owned Lisa Dent Gallery in San Francisco, where she presented the work of emerging and mid-career international artists. Dent received her BFA from Howard University, her MFA from NYU, and completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in Curatorial Studies. 

isa saldaña is a Black and Asian care partner and arts worker who gathers people over writing, exhibitions, performances, and meals to manifest and support ways of living otherwise. In their personal and artistic practice, saldaña uses performance, immersive installation, poetry, and culinary design as entry points for understanding and further researching histories of intimacy, labor, and social ecologies. Their current projects are focused on expanding pleasurable and meaningful food access for queer, trans, and disabled folks in the diaspora.  
 
As Senior Manager of Artist & Community Development at the Laundromat Project, saldaña also serves as a thought partner, resource, and guide for their artists in residence, fellows, community members, and the neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant. 

Joselia Rebekah Hughes is a Mad and chronically ill Afro Caribbean writer, access worker, artist, and educator based in the Bronx. She lives with sickle cell disease. She is a poetry editor at Apogee Journal. Hughes’s work interrogates debility, (de)capacitation, play, experiences of pain, and linguistics of access. She uses wordplay, oral traditions, and the archetype of the fool as measures to question and provoke societal perceptions and values regarding chronic illness, madness, neurodivergence, and debility. Her practicing mediums include video and photography, dance, literature, small sculpture, fiber work, drawing, zine-making, and drawing and painting. She’s shared work at the Institute of Contemporary Art: VCU, Richmond, Virginia; Participant Inc., New York; Lincoln Center, New York; MoMA, New York; Leslie Lohman Museum, New York; Bard College, Swarthmore College, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and elsewhere. Hughes’s poetry has been nominated for “Best of the Net” and has been published in Apogee Journal, The Massachusetts Review, The Poetry Project, Split This Rock, BlackFlash Magazine, and elsewhere. 

Madison Smith is a Brooklyn-based art historian, poet, and programmer exploring ideas of intimacy, autobiography, and collective care. Since 2017, she has shaped spaces that support the creativity and interpersonal transformation of Black queer and trans people. Smith has managed a diverse range of programs in partnership with organizations such as the Art Institute of Chicago; the Chicago Architecture Center; Evanston Art Center; Field Museum; Hyde Park Art Center; LATITUDE | Chicago; Links Hall; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. As a Programs Assistant at the Studio Museum, she supports the educational initiatives of the Department of Learning and Engagement. Smith is currently a cofounder of Monarch Art and Wellness, a collaborative project bridging the gaps between art and wellness.