Adrienne Edwards is a New York–based art curator, scholar, and writer.[1][2] Edwards is currently the Engell Speyer Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Whitney Museum of American Art.[3]
Edwards curated performance commissions at Performa from 2010 to 2018.[4]
From 2016 to in 2018, Edwards worked as curator at large at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.[4] As of 2018 Edwards, was a Performance Studies Ph.D. student at N.Y.U.[5] In 2016, she curated a show Blackness in Abstraction, at Pace Gallery.[6][7]
In 2019, Edwards with Danielle A. Jackson curated an exhibition at the Whitney: Jason Moran, the first museum survey devoted to the MacArthur-winning pianist and conceptualist.[8]
In October 2019, the Whitney Museum announced that Adrienne Edwards and David Breslin would curate the 2022 Whitney Biennial.[9] She is the official co-curator alongside David Breslin for Quiet as It’s Kept, the eighteenth iteration of the landmark exhibition.[10] The 2022 Whitney Biennial officially opens to the public on April 6, 2022.
Edwards authored the catalog for Blackness in Abstraction, the group exhibition she organized at Pace Gallery; as well as, contributing to the "Carrie Mae Weems: The Kitchen Table Series" and Ellen Gallagher's catalog Accidental Records.[11] Edwards was the performance reviews editor for the journal of feminist theory Women & Performance.[4]
Edwards chaired the juries that selected Kapwani Kiwanga for the Frieze Artist Award (2018)[12] and Simone Leigh and Sonia Boyce for awards at the Venice Biennale (2022).[13] In 2019, she nominated Yto Barrada for the Prince Pierre Foundation's International Contemporary Art Prize; the prize ultimately went to Arthur Jafa though.[14][15]
Other activities include: