Southwest Contemporary announces our inaugural Community Editorial Advisory Board, a group of arts leaders from across the region who will provide us with critical feedback about important stories we need to tell.
After a meaningful year of growth and relationship-building across the Southwest region, we are thrilled to be entering the new year with a new network of support! I’m pleased to introduce you to our inaugural volunteer Community Editorial Advisory Board members, to whom we are so grateful for their willingness to lend their support, insights, and expertise to our work.
As a new addition to our editorial operations, our advisory board members will provide direct links from our team to arts communities across the Southwest and beyond, with the goal of making our journalism more relevant and inclusive.
The board is comprised of arts leaders from communities across the region with different life experiences and expertise, and will meet with our core editorial team throughout the year to discuss issues within the arts we want to examine, guide and inform story ideas, connect us with contributors, sources, experts, and other stakeholders, and be a valuable source of input and feedback. We are so excited to begin our work together this month—please join us in welcoming them to our team!
Breana Connor
Breana Connor (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist, leader, and healer from Oakland.
As a storyteller, dancer, and performance artist, Breana is interested in community accountability, radical financial transparency, healing ancestral trauma, and pleasure activism.
Their organizational work is rooted in nonprofit and social justice spaces with a focus on operations and advocacy. Their care has supported BIPOC communities, humans living in incarcerated spaces, our unhoused neighbors, queer youth, and survivors of sexual violence.
Breana’s piece Grief Movement can be viewed at the Harwood Art Center’s 2023 Encompass.
Amanda Curreri
Amanda Curreri is an artist and educator. Her artwork is situated between textiles and painting, characterized by an engagement with social histories of resistance. Textiles are key to her work for their ability to invite an experience of collectivity and connection. In 2022, she joined the faculty at the Department of Art at UNM.
Curreri’s artwork has recently been commissioned by Facebook Open Arts, the Cincinnati Museum of Art, Oakland Museum of California, the Asian Art Museum (San Francisco), and more. Her artwork has been featured in The New York Times, Artforum, VICE, Hyperallergic, Frieze Art, KQED Arts, San Francisco Chronicle, and more. Curreri holds an MFA from the California College of the Arts, a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a BA from Tufts University in Sociology and Peace & Justice Studies. Curreri is represented by Romer Young Gallery in San Francisco.
Nancy Good
Las Vegas-based artist, advocate, and curator Nancy Good is known for conceptual abstracts, colorful murals, photographic composites, and analog-to-digital visual works. Influenced by synesthesia related to vibration and eclectic DNA revealing connections with cultures the world over, Good’s work weaves the materials and tools of modern times while also honoring the mark-making of ancient ancestries.
In addition to facilitating the artist-run nonprofit Core Arts Concord since 2018, operating her gallery Core Contemporary, and supporting the arts community of Las Vegas, Good maintains a disciplined studio schedule and stays active in private/public art commissions, mural projects, mentoring, and teaching.
Good’s multi-disciplinary work has been seen in exhibitions across the country and abroad in locations such as regional museums and immersive art spaces; private, corporate, and institutional art spaces; and galleries across the country. Good has received four congressional commendations for her artistic contributions, and her work is found in private collections throughout the U.S. and overseas.
Emily Hallowell
Emily Hallowell was born in 1969 in New York City. She received a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Tufts University. In 1996 she earned an MFA from Mills College.
Works by Hallowell are held in public and private collections and have been exhibited in galleries in the U.S. and UK and featured in periodicals, including Harper’s Magazine. Currently, Emily is a member of Untitled Gallery in Tucson, Arizona, where she oversees curatorial decisions, promotion, and all social media content. Untitled Gallery, a nonprofit, volunteer-run fine-art gallery in Tucson that features local, nationally recognized artists.
Mary Kershaw
Mary Kershaw is the executive director and CEO of the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff, Arizona, having moved there from Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she served as director of the New Mexico Museum of Art.
Prior to moving to the Southwest, Mary worked in museums across the UK, including as director of collections at York Museums Trust, and Head of Museums & Arts in Harrogate Borough Council. One of the driving passions in her career is to bring the power of art and the work of artists, past and present, to as wide an audience as possible through exhibitions, programming, publications, and partnerships. International experience includes cultural projects with the UK, Lithuania, Poland, Austria, and Germany.
Lisa Le Feuvre
Lisa Le Feuvre is a curator, writer, and editor. Focusing on art as a powerful force to retune perceptions, Le Feuvre has curated more than sixty exhibitions as an institutional and independent curator, played a pivotal role in shaping academic and arts organizations, edited more than thirty books and journals, spoken at 150 museums and universities across the world, and has published more than 125 essays and interviews with artists. Currently, she is the inaugural executive director of Holt/Smithson Foundation, an artist-endowed foundation based in Santa Fe dedicated to the creative legacies of artists Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. Until 2018 she was based in the United Kingdom, where she variously directed the Henry Moore Institute, a center for the study of sculpture; taught on the post-graduate Curatorial Program at Goldsmiths College; led the contemporary art program at the National Maritime Museum; and has sat on various juries including Sculpture Dublin (2021), Turner Prize (2018), Hepworth Prize for Sculpture (2016), British representation at Venice Biennale (2015), Max Mara Prize for Women (2013), and co-curated British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet (2009-10).
Djamila Ricciardi
Djamila Ricciardi is an arts worker from Denver, Colorado. She is proud of her diverse cultural roots and has a great appreciation for all forms of creative expression. Djamila majored in art history at Scripps College in Claremont, California, and studied abroad in Florence, Italy. Upon the completion of her BA degree in 2010, she returned to her hometown and became fully immersed in the local art scene through her work at various cultural and arts-based organizations. Djamila is a creative thinker and community connector who finds fulfillment in sharing ideas and working collaboratively with others.
John Sproul
John Sproul works with the figure to explore human identity and experience, pushing into what we know we don’t know from places we know. Sproul earned a BFA from the University of Utah in 1993. The artist has had more than twenty solo exhibitions and participated in more than 120 group exhibitions internationally, which include the Getty Museum, Los Angeles; UMFA, Salt Lake City; UMOCA, Salt Lake City; The Painting Center, New York; Bipolar Projects, Barcelona; Galerie Metanoia, Paris; Kunstwerk Carlshutte, Germany; and the Sienna Art Institute, Italy.
As an arts advocate, he served on UMFA’s FOCA Executive Committee (2006-2013, chair in 2013); founded and directed the Foster Art Program (2009-2011); founded and directed the Utah Contemporary Art Think Tank (2010-2011); owned and directed Nox Contemporary Art Gallery (2010-2022), and is the director of The Art Group (2007-present).
Chris Taylor
Chris Taylor was born in West Germany, raised in Southwest Florida waters, and lives in the arid American Southwest. An architect, educator, and director of Land Arts of the American West at Texas Tech University, Taylor is deeply committed to the intersection of human construction and the evolving nature of the planet. Terminal Lake Exploration Platform, created with support from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, continues to facilitate visual and performative research within under-examined basins and internal aquatic fringes. Taylor studied architecture at the University of Florida and the Graduate School of Design at Harvard and is a member of the Lubbock Scapes Collective.
