Brooklyn Museum curator Stephanie Sparling Williams shares insights into the process of creating Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art, a highly innovative reimagining of how contemporary audiences experience historic American art. 

Sparling Williams is the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of American Art at the Brooklyn Museum. Her curatorial practice is predicated on interdisciplinary research, writing, and teaching on American art, and foregrounds Black Feminist space-making. Her scholarly work is invested in the space of the museum, with a focus on Black American art and culture, and the work of U.S.-based artists of color. Related interests include material histories, cross cultural exchange, strategies of address, and contemporary art that engages with the history of the United States. Disrupting traditional presentations of art from the Americas and offering a new set of approaches to collection display and interpretation, her groundbreaking reinstallation Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art and the accompanying publication reframe 2,000 years of art drawn from the world-renowned holdings of the Brooklyn Museum.

This program is presented as part of an ongoing Loeb initiative, generously supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, to reinterpret and reinstall the museum’s significant collection of Hudson River School art.