“You’re always working in a community, and that makes you think differently about things.”
Curating a Practice
The Whitney-Lauder Fellowship has supported curators for over two decades; its impact continues at the ICA and beyond
Published: March 13, 2024
Daniella Rose King would know: as the Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow at Penn’s Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), her inaugural curatorial project involved not one but four different artists and a variety of works. The resulting 2018 exhibition, “The Last Place They Thought Of,” explored how geography, ideology, and space determine and reproduce uneven social relations. “I’d been thinking in broad strokes about questions of climate change,” says King, “and the theory that the moment of contact between European settlers and the genocide of indigenous Americans had an atmospheric, climatic impact.”
Being a curator, those thoughts naturally led to another: “I thought, ‘How do you tell that story through an exhibition?’”
The Gift of Time
It’s an ambitious mind that undertakes a non-linear exhibition addressing the history of slavery and colonialism, whose internecine impacts have touched every level of contemporary Western culture. And it’s minds like these that the Whitney-Lauder Fellowship is designed to support with resources, institutional exposure, and time.
Started in 2000 thanks to a gift from Leonard A. Lauder, W’54, the Fellowship has linked the ICA and the Whitney Museum of American Art for over two decades, offering professional experience and a two-year tenure for curatorial alumni of the Whitney Independent Study Program. Today, the ICA counts an impressive cast among its former fellows, including Naomi Beckwith (Deputy Director and Chief Curator, The Guggenheim), Bennett Simpson (Senior Curator, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art), and Lucy Gallun (Curator of Photography, MOMA).
“This was such a prestigious opportunity,” recounts King. “It’s been an avenue that has cultivated lots of experimentation and support for ideas and for going into new, unknown spaces with one’s curatorial practice.”
A New High Water Mark with “Sargasso Sea”
“Sargasso Sea,” King’s third and final curatorial project with the ICA, employs elements similar to her second curatorial project, “An Unlikely Birth,” which presented an exhibition of synthetic and living works by Jamaican artist Deborah Anzinger. “Sargasso Sea” features works by Dominique White and Alberta Whittle and borrows its name from the only body of water defined by oceanic currents rather than shorelines. These currents have shaped colonial expansion, trade, and trafficking and increasingly have become the bearers of environmental devastation, tumult, and migration.
The Whitney-Lauder Fellowship gave me the opportunity to think about my own curatorial practice, carte blanche—a clean slate, a research budget, and a real respect for my own process.”Daniella Rose King
As a kunsthalle, or non-collecting museum, each exhibition at the ICA is an opportunity for curators to expand beyond the boundaries of fixed collections. For King, this meant no boundaries to what she could borrow and bring in. The result? “I feel like I’ve seen the end of the post-racial moment and the disregard of Black artists and curators,” King says of her fifteen years in the curatorial world. “My practice since has been a kind of trying to insist upon cultural art.”
Preview the current season of exhibitions or visit the ICA website to learn more.
