Ashley James is Rewriting the Terms of Engagement

The Hugo Boss Prize premiere of Deanna Lawson’s film Centropy at The Guggenheim this September was an event fusing the oil and water of the art and fashion worlds—and Ashley James, Guggenheim curator, is at the intersection of the two. She is younger and smaller than you’d anticipate, and much brighter, literally. Amongst a sea of neutrals, James—decked out in bright orange silk and cow-print boots—happily chatted with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith and a young blogger with equal enthusiasm. 

For an industry often regarded as stuffy, James is a welcome fixture. For one, she’s friendly, which is comforting and rarer than you’d imagine. And secondly, and more importantly, she provides the museum scene a different lens, one that had absolutely no intention of entering the art world. Like most Americans, James noted that until she enrolled at university, “I never really understood what art history was.” However, this didn’t hold her back. 

In November 2019, James made history as the Guggenheim’s first Black curator, armed with ideas for future exhibits. But, by Summer 2020, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum projected a pandemic-induced $13 million deficit. And, due to restrictions, the museum was forced to cancel the highly-anticipated Joan Mitchell retrospective for its iconic rotunda. Unlike its peers at the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim found itself without a tentpole show ready to deploy once restrictions eased and, for a museum reliant on foot traffic for 30 percent of revenue, a shifting calendar was a highly precarious situation. One that needed fixing, quickly and with the aid of its newest curator.

James, 34, does not satisfy a generic archetype found within the fine-art world. “My parents are Jamaican immigrants, and as such, they encouraged pursuit in law, engineering, and medicine,” she says. “But they never discouraged me from pursuing humanities-related things.” She eventually enrolled at Yale University for her dual Ph.D. in Literature and African American Studies, later expanding into Women, Gender, and Sexuality. When an opportunity arose for her to organize a Yale University Art Gallery, James jumped at her “first foray into curating.” The show ​​Odd Volumes: Book Art from the Allan Chasanoff Collection, “really allowed me to express myself in the best way [after] I realized in graduate school that I didn't want to be a professor,” she says. “I was really interested in limits, boundaries, and the terms of engagement.”

Since then, she’s worked at the MoMa, and as lead curator for Brooklyn Museum’s Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (2018–19) and Eric N. Mack: Lemme walk across the room (2019). She’s curated mixed media, paintings, and most recently, a “coincidental” surge of photography. “I think it reflects the fact that photography is a space where these really knotty questions around representation and value play out,” she explains. The access to photography and photos in the modern age, as she points out, has become ubiquitous in visual culture—how we engage with them is her focus. With “discourse around Black art and visual culture writ large, it's where so many of those questions are heightened,” she says. “Portrait photography, especially because you’re imaging actual people.” With her recent critically acclaimed shows vacillating between how we captured Black subjects both historically (Off the Record) and presently (Deanna Lawson), James’ work highlights the varying nature of “everyday engagement with materials that every person has.”

With the Mitchell retrospective canceled, the Guggenheim was forced to reshuffle, eventually deciding to combine its supply of smaller exhibitions slated for future release. It was an unforeseen hit. By the time the spring rolled around, one New York Times article had attributed the experimental phase as “How the Guggenheim Got Its Groove Back,” later musing, “that the post-lockdown Guggenheim [was] home to the single most charismatic art space in town.” Regarding James’ Off the Record, critics commended its timeliness and depth: not only reactionary to the social-rights climate spurred by George Floyd but one that could pose questions for those collectively attempting to learn. In reality, the exhibition was one James “would have done a year ago, two years ago,” she told NBC. As she explains to me, her work within any social diaspora addresses "questions that feel like they need to be answered, as opposed to projects that I feel I need to do." 

To James, one of the best places to seek answers is at the museum. Museums “have a longer time span,” she says, “you can become the authority on a topic.” Her position, as she’s historically pointed out, gives her an opportunity to approach questions with the  “understanding that whiteness and power kind of undergird everything.” A point reflected in the current statistics of New York City artist representation (80 percent white), which, as she notes, gallery or museum: “Everyone is implicated in that.” But if “we want to bring artists who have been underrecognized because of racism or other reasons, then there is an authority that the museum has,” she notes, “it is a place to kind of slow down, research, and write history.” 

Of the three separate yet connected mid-size shows this spring at the Guggenheim, James curated two. Combined with her 2020 Brooklyn Museum show John Edmonds: A Sidelong Glance, she pulled off what nary a museum curator can boast—three shows within 12 months—a curatorial hat-trick. 

So, what’s next? “I'm actually forming the idea.” After cheekily asking if I could get some insight on what it may be, she laughed, “It's not gonna be public knowledge for a while.” 

I’ll put it on my calendar.