Photo credit: Christopher Callison
Ade Omotosho (BA in Art History, 2017) has been awarded the Pérez Art Museum Miami's (PAMM) inaugural Ford Foundation Curatorial Fellowship. The Ford Fellowship is offered to undergraduate or graduate students of color who have recently completed their studies and wish to embark on a career in the curatorial field. The program supports PAMM’s mission to encourage diversity and access in the curatorial field, and seeks to address the under-representation of people of color in positions of leadership in American museums.
Omotosho is a recent graduate of The University of Texas at Austin's Department of Art and Art History, where he received his Bachelors in Art History with Honors. He is the recipient of the Fulbright-Hays Grant for intensive Yoruba language study, and spent 10 weeks at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. He has previously served as a Fellow at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) in the department of photography. In 2017, Omotosho was selected as one of the senior undergraduate student in Art History to present at the annual Undergraduate Art History Research Symposium in April. His presentation, the result of thesis research culminating his undergraduate research studies, was titled "Born to Die: Yoruba Aesthetics in the Art of Rotimi Fani-Kayode." Artist Rotimi Fani-Kayode rose to the surface of his research interests during and after his time spent at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston's photography department. Thesis research on Fani-Kayode turned out to be, in Omotosho's words, "The perfect constellation of events and interests."
Pérez Art Museum Miami, south facade, Photo by Armando Colls (MannyofMiami.com)
Omotosho's fellowship at MFAH would prove incredibly formative as he worked with his on-site mentor, Malcolm Daniel, in the photography department. Between September 2016 and September 2018, Omotosho worked on the acquisition of works from the photographer Fazal Sheikh for the exhibition, Homelands and Histories: Photographs by Fazal Sheikh. The Wall Street Journal would later review the exhibition, describing Sheikh's moving portraits as photographs of "people caught by accident of birth or geography in the steel jaws of modern history."
During an interview with Omotosho in the midst of his MFAH fellowship, he remarked, "There's something about working in contemporary photography, today, that's also very interesting to me because there is also so much work that you can choose, so the question becomes about how you decide, how you curate and acquire. As a curator, I become involved almost as an arbiter of what is good and what isn't, and that's a tremendous responsibility. And I'm still learning that."
As PAMM’s first Curatorial Fellow, Omotosho will gain in-depth fieldwork experience over the course of two years, working closely with curators and museum leadership to research, design, and produce upcoming exhibitions at PAMM.