The Department of Art History presents a visiting scholar lecture by
Maura Reilly
Wednesday, November 4, at 5:30 PM
Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University
601 W Broad St, Richmond, VA 23220
Maura Reilly is the Director of the Zimmerli Art Museum and Professor of Art History at Rutgers University. She has held several leadership positions in the arts, including as Executive Director of the National Academy of Design and Senior Curator at the American Federation of Arts. She is the Founding Curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, where she developed and launched the first exhibition and public programming space in the USA devoted entirely to feminist art. While there, she organized several landmark exhibitions, including the permanent installation of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party and the blockbuster Global Feminisms (co-curated with Linda Nochlin), among others.
Reilly has curated over two dozen exhibitions internationally with a focus on under-represented artists and social justice concerns, including, most recently, transfeminisms (2024-5), Michelle Agins: Storyteller (2024), judy watson: shadow bone (2024), and Wandamba yalungka/Winds change direction (2021). She has also organized international exhibitions on contemporary Indigenous art, LGBTQI+ art, feminist art, as well as retrospective exhibitions with artists Ghada Amer, Nayland Blake, Richard Bell, and Miriam Schapiro. Reilly has written extensively on curatorial practice, including Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating (Thames & Hudson, 2018), which has received many accolades, including a listing as one of the “Top 10 Best Art Books” of 2018 from The New York Times. Her next book, Museums & Social Justice, is forthcoming from Thames & Hudson in 2026, followed thereafter in 2027 with Speculating Otherwise: Feminist Art Now, co-authored with Liisa Rávna Finbog. Reilly has held academic positions at the Tufts University (Medford, MA), Queensland College of Art (Brisbane, Australia), and at Arizona State University (Tempe, AZ). Dr. Reilly received her M.A. and PhD in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.
Photo Credit: Grace Roselli
