Lauren Tate Baeza Is Named Curator Of Curator of African Art
The High Museum of Art announced last month that Lauren Tate Baeza will be the new curator of African Art.
High Museum
The High Museum of Art announced last month that Lauren Tate Baeza will be the museum’s curator of African Art. Before taking this new position Baeza was the director of exhibition at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights.
“Lauren’s depth of experience in not only museums but also community organizations focused on education and outreach, and her considerable accomplishments as a curator, scholar and leader, make her uniquely positioned to guide the future of our African art department,” Rand Suffolk, director of the High Museum, says of this new hire.
Tate Baeza joined “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes to talk about her new role as curator, and what she hopes to accomplish while working for the High Museum.
Interview Highlights:
On how she first became interested in Africa:
“I’ve always had an affinity for Africa, I always found it to be a really interesting way to engage a vast range of topics. I think a easy low hanging thing for me regard to my interest in Africa is my parents. My parents were activists, and their activism wasn’t celebrated. It was just the right thing to do….It was just who they were. And they raised myself and my brothers to be sort of global citizens. And to look at broad systems of racism, classism, and sexism. This just happened sort of as an extension of how we grew up. It was like the books that were around are the things that discuss the coffee table. And I think one of the ways that they really wanted us to internalize deeply, a global sense of belonging was to instill in us a pan Africanist worldview, that is to say that it was important to them, that we imagine ourselves as greater than a population that had endured great suffering for a few hundred years in the Western Hemisphere.”
On her social media campaign #artfordignity:
“I really wanted to engage the community, which has been a part of my practice the whole time, when I make an exhibition for the center or another organization, that process always involves partner building, and listening to the communities that are going to be represented in the exhibition. Or who we think the topic of the exhibition is particularly valuable too, and making sure that they’re represented and that there’s some cultural sensitivity and sense of ownership over the exhibition that is shared, and that it’s not just coming from me and my ideas, but that there is a collaboration.”
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