The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art is on its way to becoming a special hub for Black art. 

Curators of color from all over the world will have access to a unique position as part of the museum’s $5 million Blackmon-Perry Fellowship, a three-year program that Brooks’ executive director, Mark Resnick, says will be good for Memphis and the new Brooks. 

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“It will bring much more attention to Memphis to show that we are able to do groundbreaking work in this area,” Resnick said. 

The fellowship is named in honor of civic leader Joyce Blackmon — the first Black person and the first woman to serve as a vice president at Memphis Light, Gas & Water — and Elliot Perry, former NBA player, an avid collector of Black art (as seen on Instagram) and a longtime partner of the Brooks.

Under the Blackmon-Perry Fellowship, chosen curators will have the opportunity to conceive an original exhibition, accompany that exhibition with a scholarly catalog and steward an acquisition fund to acquire Black art for the museum’s permanent collection. 

Resnick called the fellowship a “crucial endeavor” that defies traditional curatorial and museum practices. 

“The museum world has been notoriously deficient in making sure that there is representation by curators of color and that there is a pipeline for that and so on,” he said. 

According to Resnick, most aspiring curators will join a museum fellowship and work a year (or more) “tethered” to a more established curator, assisting with exhibitions but likely not creating their own. 

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The Blackmon-Perry Fellowship combats this tradition by serving as a valuable source of experience and preparing new curators for the next phase of their artistic careers. 

Over the Brooks’ 107-year history, the position is the first to be endowed in perpetuity. 

Rosamund Garrett, chief curator for the Brooks Museum, said the fellowship is structured in a way that is completely unique in this country. 

“As someone from the U.K., I can say it doesn’t happen over there either,” Garrett said. “It really is going to change the dynamic of this museum for the better.”

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Both Garrett and Resnick alluded to the fact that their ideal fellow may possess identical qualities to Heather Nickels, a current museum fellow. Nickels is the holder of the Joyce Blackmon Curatorial Fellowship in African American Art and Art of the African Diaspora, from which the Blackmon-Perry Fellowship was born.

Resnick called this previous fellowship a “pilot program,” adding that without its new endowment and the work of Nickels, it was likely to expire. 

Nickels took on the fellow position in 2019, after finishing graduate school in London.

During her two-year tenure, Nickels produced “Persevere and Resist: The Strong Black Women of Elizabeth Catlett,” which included, “The Black Woman,” a series of 15 linocut prints that Catlett created in 1946 and 1947. 

“I look forward to seeing the fellowship’s curatorial legacy. Ten, 15, 50 years from now, numerous emerging curators of color will have had the opportunity to find their curatorial voice in Memphis, Tennessee.”

Heather Nickels
Joyce Blackmon Curatorial Fellow in African American Art and Art of the African Diaspora

The series featured images of Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman and Phillis Wheatley. 

“Art can be powerful and emotional and cathartic, and I think that ‘Persevere’ was all of those things,” Garrett said. 

Nickels said she felt a personal connection to the theme of the exhibition, which explored Black womanhood and motherhood, fears and rewards of being Black in America, family, legacy and history. 

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Nickels added that she couldn’t think of a better exhibition to undertake during the fellowship and in a majority Black city. 

As her fellowship comes to an end this summer, Nickels has plans to earn her Ph.D., adding that her support of the program will not come to an end. 

“As an art historian and curator, I’m thrilled to see the incredible works by Black artists — local, regional, national and international — that the museum will be able to usher into the collection thanks to this generous endowment. But perhaps more than that, I look forward to seeing the fellowship’s curatorial legacy. Ten, 15, 50 years from now, numerous emerging curators of color will have had the opportunity to find their curatorial voice in Memphis, Tennessee, and each of the scholars, myself included, that make up that vast network will all be tied to this place, regardless of where each of us ends up in the world.

“While the fellowship is a fixed period of time, each of us will be a part of this robust and beautiful community that continues to grow, and which can support us as we navigate this complex field — and I can’t wait to be a part of it,” Nickels said. 

One of the pieces Nickels selected was “Migration of the Gods,” a work by Chicago-based Afro-Cuban American artist Harmonia Rosales. 

The painting highlights survivors of the forced voyage of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas, and imagines the orishas or deities of the Yorùbá people (southwestern Nigeria, Benin, and Togo), as survivors of the journey. 

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Garrett said having Rosales’ piece is a big deal, because such artwork is often commissioned to “big name” institutions, such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, making it harder for smaller museums to acquire them. 

“Migration of the Gods” will be available for viewing at the Brooks Museum this fall.