Curator Chat

We Ask Leading Museum Curators About What’s Going On In Their World

Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto
PhD, Senior Curator of American Art
New-York Historical Society Museum & Library
170 Central Park West, New York, NY 10024 • www.nyhistory.org

What event (gallery show, museum exhibit, etc.) in the next few months are you looking forward to, and why?
I’m eager to see Life Cycles: The Materials of Contemporary Design at MoMA, curated by Paola Antonelli and Maya Ellerkmann. The exhibition explores how design can lead us toward a more hopeful environmental future by advancing collaboration with, rather than dominance over, the rest of the natural world. Earlier this year, I walked with the curators through my own exhibition Nature, Crisis, Consequence, which examined the environmental crisis as a civil rights crisis from the 19th century to the present day. We found many synergies between our work, particularly in terms of how culture does not stand apart from but shapes both environmental problems and solutions to them.

What are you reading?
I just finished reading Jenny Tinghui Zhang’s Four Treasures of the Sky, a poetic and haunting novel about a Chinese girl struggling to survive in the American West after being kidnapped from her homeland. It’s a work of historical fiction, set during the era of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and inspired by a roadside historical marker referencing a “Chinese Hanging” in Idaho. I read it because I had just commissioned a painting for the New-York Historical Society from a brilliant artist named Livien Yin, who like Zhang, brings Chinese immigrant histories—long sidelined from received narratives of the United States—to light.

Interesting exhibit, gallery opening or work of art you’ve seen recently.
I recently participated in a convening at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for its 2026 U.S. Semiquincentennial reinstallation. While selecting works for consideration, I came across an untitled midcentury drawing by Kaua‘i-born Ray Yoshida. I saw in his bold and starkly symmetrical composition a faceless laborer, walled in by towering sugar cane stalks, and so camouflaged by as to become synonymous with them. It spoke to me of Hawaii’s plantation culture and the American business interests that drove the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom and the islands’ subsequent annexation to the United States. I am part Native Hawaiian, and to me, this type of work should be on our minds in 2026 as we think not only about the U.S. but about those nations imperiled by its rise.

What are you researching at the moment?
I just produced an exhibition and catalog on Cherokee artist Kay WalkingStick’s recent landscape paintings and their relationship to the 19th-century Hudson River School. I’m now turning my attention to an exhibition and catalog about the off-beat and inventive American romantic painter John Quidor. I’m working collaboratively with conservation colleagues on The Loyal Refugee (The Contraband), a Civil War painting by Vincent Colyer showing a Black child running toward freedom across Union lines. And I’m researching a portrait in our permanent collections of the Seneca leader Gayë́twahgeh, also known as Cornplanter, which I recently had the opportunity to discuss at the Seneca Nation with our scholar trustee Robert Odawi Porter and other Cornplanter descendants.

What is your dream exhibit to curate? Or see someone else curate?
One of my dreams is to curate an exhibition about artistic exchange within the Pacific Rim. So many rich and thought-provoking exhibitions have attended to the transatlantic world, and I think the transpacific world represents the next frontier for the field of American art.