Curator Chat

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

Exterior view of the Speed Art Museum.

Erika, Holmquist-Wall
Chief Curator, and Mary and Barry Bingham Sr. curator of painting and sculpture
Speed Art Museum
2035 S. Third Street, Louisville, KY 40208 www.speedmuseum.org

What event (gallery show, museum exhibit, etc.) in the next few months are you looking forward to, and why?

After recently finishing a major collection reinstallation, I’m eager to get out and see how other museums are rethinking their permanent galleries. The last few years have pushed all of us to look more honestly at how we tell history, and I’m curious to see how that’s showing up in gallery spaces. There’s something energizing about visiting colleagues, walking galleries and noticing what’s shifted and what has stayed put. Those visits are often where the best ideas surface and where the next phase quietly begins.

What are you reading?

All that archival work has shaped how I’m reading right now, and has me dipping into artists’ letters, travel diaries and memoirs from the 19th century, often just a few pages at a time. I love how practical and uncertain they can be. It’s strangely comforting to hear artists worrying about light, deadlines or whether their work will matter. I’ve also made a New Year’s resolution to pleasure-read beyond my usual Nordic noir, and Aimee Bender and Karen Russell have been happily pulling me somewhere stranger and more unexpected.

Interesting exhibit, gallery opening or work of art you’ve seen recently?

I have to give applause to an exceptional show right in the Speed’s backyard at the 21c Museum Hotel in Louisville (and you should definitely check out the exhibitions at other 21c sites across the U.S.). Alice Gray Stites has pulled together an extraordinary suite of works from the collection of Steve Wilson and Laura Lee Brown in the ambitious exhibition Revival: Digging into Yesterday, Planting Tomorrow. My antennae are always drawn to contemporary artists who use history to reveal how the past actively shapes who we are, and who we can become. It helps me make sense of my own work and responsibilities as a curator of historical art.

What are you researching at the moment?

With the Speed’s centennial is coming up in 2027, I’ve been spending a lot of time in the archives, looking for stories that can shape the celebration in meaningful ways. I’m drawn to the lives of objects and the people who brought the museum into being over the last century. Slowing down with unexpected discoveries has been especially rewarding. Small notes, old photographs and letters remind me that museums are built through relationships and memory, carried forward one generation at a time.

What is your dream exhibit to curate? Or see someone else curate?

I’d love to see more attention given to American art of the 1920s through the 1940s, a period that feels newly relevant and still underexplored. Artists were responding to mass media, economic upheaval, migration and political change in ways that feel strikingly close to our own moment. I’m especially interested in the many women painters, sculptors, photographers and printmakers whose work has been overlooked. There’s still so much waiting to be seen.