WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Williams College Museum of Art is thrilled to announce three new curatorial appointments: Christa Clarke, Director of Curatorial Strategy for the new museum project; Dan Byers, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art; and Rachael Nelson, Mellon Curatorial Fellow.
“At this unprecedented moment in WCMA’s history, as we break ground on our first purpose-built home, the museum staff is hard at work researching and caring for the collection, planning for the move to the new building, and envisioning the future program,” Class of 1956 Director Pamela Franks said. “We are beyond excited to add the curatorial experience and perspective of Christa, Dan and Rachael to the team at this critical and generative moment.”
As Director of Curatorial Strategy, Clarke will help shape and implement the vision for WCMA’s future in our new building. Her decades of experience in curatorial leadership and forging close collaborations among educators and curators positions her ideally to contribute to the next era of WCMA’s teaching mission. She will work collaboratively with staff to develop the curatorial strategy and content related to the inaugural installation, publication and website. She also will contribute to WCMA’s global collections through research, stewardship and acquisitions in her area of scholarly expertise, historic and contemporary arts of global Africa.
As WCMA’s new Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Byers will be an integral member of the museum’s curatorial engagement division. In his role he will be responsible for developing exhibitions, stewarding existing collections, and shepherding new acquisitions of modern and contemporary art. He will bring his years of curatorial leadership, expertise working with living artists, commitment to collaboration within and across institutions, scholarship, and teaching experience to bear on the vision and implementation of WCMA’s future program.
Nelson comes to WCMA having most recently served as an educator at Old North Illuminated Church, where she facilitated visitor learning through historical interpretation of the church with a focus on anti-racism and active citizenship. In addition to her ongoing scholarship on material and visual culture in the Ancient Mediterranean, her prior internship experience conducting provenance research on collection objects, managing policy for deaccession proposals, and creating a new model for institutional records management will be a tremendous asset to the mission critical work of assessing, researching, and interpreting WCMA’s collection for the inaugural installation in the new building, which she will be actively participating in during her fellowship.
With the addition of Clarke, Byers, and Nelson to the extraordinary team of curators of exhibitions and collections and curators of engagement, WCMA is primed to undertake a thoughtful and deliberate process of curatorial visioning that encompasses the findings from a comprehensive collections assessment and embraces the possibilities offered by the new facility to build a museum of the future that centers gathering and learning together with art.
Christa Clarke
Clarke comes to WCMA with more than three decades of museum experience, including cross-departmental curatorial practice and collaborative interpretative work with educators. Most recently she served as Senior Advisor at the Center for Curatorial Leadership (CCL), a leadership training program of which she is also an alumni as a 2012 CCL Fellow. Previously, she was Senior Curator at the Newark Museum of Art, where she established its significant collection of modern and contemporary African art during her 16-year tenure and created its Arts of Global Africa department, an institutional model that has since been adopted by other museums. She has also served as consulting curator at various institutions, including Smith College Museum of Art, the Neuberger Museum of Art, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Memphis Brooks Museum, and the San Antonio Museum of Art. Her extensive professional service includes several leadership roles within the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC), most recently as President from 2017 to 2019, and as a board member of the Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA).
Clarke is also active as a teacher and scholar with an emphasis on museum studies, the history of collections, and the politics of representation. She has held recent teaching appointments at NYU Abu Dhabi, Boston University, and the University of Pennsylvania and research fellowships at the Clark Art Institute, Harvard University, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her publications include Representing Africa in American Art Museums (2011, co-edited with Kathleen Berzock), African Art at the Barnes Foundation (2015), Arts of Global Africa: The Newark Museum Collection (2018) and The Activist Collector: Lida Clanton Broner’s 1938 Journey from Newark to South Africa (2023). She received her B.A. from University of Virginia and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, where she studied under Professors Ekpo Eyo and David C. Driskell.
Dan Byers
Byers joins WCMA with a distinguished practice as a curator of contemporary art with a recent focus on commissioning new work with living artists. As the John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Director of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, he has also taught curatorial studies in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies and at the Graduate School of Design. His projects at the Carpenter Center include exhibitions featuring Janiva Ellis, Harry Smith (with the Whitney Museum of American Art), Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, Pope.L, Morgan Bassichis (with the ICA at VCU), B. Ingrid Olson, Candice Lin (with the Walker Art Center), Deidrick Brackens and Katherine Bradford, Tony Cokes (with Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art and ARGOS), Jonathan Berger (with PARTICIPANT, INC), Anna Oppermann, Liz Magor (with the Renaissance Society), and Renée Green. Previously, he was Mannion Family Senior Curator at the ICA/Boston, where he organized solo exhibitions featuring Diane Simpson, Geoffrey Farmer, and Steve McQueen, and group exhibitions The Artist’s Museum and the 2017 Foster Prize Exhibition.
Before moving to Boston, Byers was the inaugural Richard Armstrong Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Carnegie Museum of Art and co-curator, with Daniel Baumann and Tina Kukielski, of the 2013 Carnegie International. In addition to overseeing the Carnegie’s acquisitions of modern and contemporary art, he worked closely with artists Cathy Wilkes and Ragnar Kjartansson to present their first U.S. solo museum exhibitions. He was curator of the Icelandic Pavilion at 60th Venice Biennale featuring artist Hildigunur Birgisdottir. He was chair of the 2019 Curatorial Leadership Summit at the Armory Show, and co-organizer (with Ruba Katrib) of Why New Forms, Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies 20th anniversary conference. Earlier in his career, he held positions at The Fabric Workshop and Museum and the Walker Art Center. Byers holds an M.A. from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and a B.S. in Studio Art from Skidmore College.
Rachael Nelson
Nelson received a BA in Classical Archaeology and Fine Arts from Saint Anselm College in 2021. While pursuing her undergraduate degree she participated in excavations with the Mediterranean Institute of Archaeology in Orvieto, Italy, working on Etruscan and Late Republic/Early Imperial Roman sites. In 2023 she received her MA in the History of Art and Architecture and certificate in Museum Studies from Boston University. Her ongoing research examines the relationship between material and visual culture in the Ancient Mediterranean. She has diverse experience working with community arts and history organizations, including the Gibson House Museum, the Fenway Alliance, and the Old North Church and Historic Site.
About Williams College Museum of Art
The Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) creates and inspires transformative experiences that are integral to a liberal arts education, lifelong learning, and human connection. The museum catalyzes cross-disciplinary inquiry through art; advances the academic and experiential preparation of arts leaders; enriches the cultural ecosystem of the Berkshires; engages artists; and creates a learning community that spurs new thinking, creative activity, and civic engagement. WCMA draws on the diverse perspectives and collaborative ethos of the College to enliven the more than 15,000 works in its growing collection.
Construction has begun on WCMA’s first purpose-built home, designed by the internationally recognized Brooklyn-based firm SO–IL. The design, unveiled in March 2024, blends sustainable, living architecture with the Berkshires landscape while creating a teaching museum for the entire campus and a prominent new gateway to the College and Williamstown. The new WCMA is projected to open in 2027.
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