The Stamps School of Art & Design has invited a select group of internationally renowned curators, writers, artists, and arts professionals to lend their critical insights as they view and jury the program’s MFA Thesis Exhibition and First-Year Exhibition. This year, we are honored to welcome internationally acclaimed cultural producers Alisha Wormsley, Aruna D’Souza, and Robin K. Williams as this year’s Visiting Critics for a three-day campus visit. On Saturday, April 11, they will participate in a panel discussion moderated by Srimoyee Mitra, Director of Stamps Gallery. Joined by faculty, graduate students, and the broader Ann Arbor community, our Visiting Critics will reflect on the MFA candidates’ work and its dialogue with the contemporary moment.

Free and open to the public. Registration is requested. Light refreshments will be provided.

Learn More About the Visiting Critics:

Aruna D’Souza writes about modern and contemporary art; intersectional feminisms and other forms of politics; and how museums shape our views of each other and the world. Her work appears regularly in 4Columns.org, where she is a member of the editorial advisory board, and she is a contributor to The New York Times. Her writing has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, CNN.com, Art News, Garage, Bookforum, Frieze, Momus, Art in America, and Art Practical, among other places, as well as in numerous artist’s monographs and museum exhibition catalogues. Her book, Whitewalling: Art, Race, and Protest in 3 Acts (Badlands Unlimited), was named one of the best art books of 2018 by the New York Times. Recent editorial project include Linda Nochlin’s Making It Modern: Essays on the Art of the Now (Thames & Hudson, 2022) and Lorraine O’Grady’s Writing in Space 1973-2018 (Duke University Press, 2020); she co-curated the retrospective of O’Grady’s work, Both/And, that opened in March 2021 at the Brooklyn Museum. She is the recipient of the 2021 Rabkin Prize for art journalism and a 2019 Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant, and delivered the Distinguished Critics Lecture for AICA (the International Association of Art Critics) in 2019. She was appointed the Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor at the National Gallery of Art in 2022, and the W.W. Corcoran Professor of Social Engagement at the Corcoran School of Art, George Washington University, in 2022-2023.

Alisha Wormsley is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural producer. Her work contributes to the imagining of the future of arts, science, and technology through the Black matriarchal lens, challenging contemporary views of modern American life through whichever medium she feels is the best form of expression. Recent exhibitions, projects and public art commissions include; Creative Time commission with collaborator Suzanne Kite, a solo commission for the new International Arrivals Corridor at the Pittsburgh International Airport, and a solo exhibition at CUE Arts Foundation in New York. Wormsley’s ongoing project, There Are Black People In The Future recently exhibited at the Oakland Museum, VCUArts Qatar, Speed Museum, Southbank Arts London, and Times Square Arts, gives mini-grants to open up discourse around displacement and gentrification and was awarded a fellowship with Monument Lab. In 2020, Wormsley launched an art residency for Black artists who mother called Sibyls Shrine. She is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts with longtime collaborator Li Harris, an Awardee of the Sundance Interdisciplinary grant, the Carol Brown Achievement award among others. Wormsley has an MFA in Film and Video from Bard College and is an Assistant Professor of Art and Social Practice in the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.

Robin K. Williams is Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. Previously, she was Curator at The Contemporary Austin, in Texas, where she curated exhibitions including This Land (2023), Tarek Atoui: The Whisperers (2022), and Daniel Johnston: I Live My Broken Dreams (2021). Prior to that, she was a Ford Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit where she curated Daniel Dean: True Red Ruin (2018) and co-curated Sonic Rebellion: Music as Resistance (2017). Other appointments include curatorial fellowships at the Blanton Museum of Art and Visual Arts Center in Austin, Texas. She earned a PhD in Art History from the University of Texas and taught art history courses at UT-Austin and Texas State University. She served on the public art committee for UT-Austin’s Landmarks and currently serves on the public art committee for the Texas State University System.