Curator of Acclaimed Great Migration Exhibition Joins Contemporary Arts Museum Houston

Ryan N. Dennis, the curator of a critically lauded show of art made in response to the Great Migration, has been named senior curator and director of public art of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in Texas.

Alongside her appointment, Rebecca Matalon was promoted to senior curator and Patricia Restrepo was named curator. Matalon had previously been the museum’s curator, and Restrepo was its assistant curator and exhibitions manager.

Dennis was most recently chief curator and artistic director of the Center for Art & Public Exchange at Jackson’s Mississippi Museum of Art. The best known of her projects for that institution was “A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration,” which was co-organized with the Baltimore Museum of Art and which debuted in 2022.

Jessica Bell Brown co-curated the show with Dennis. The exhibition, which features commissions by Theaster Gates, Mark Bradford, Carrie Mae Weems, and more, has received widespread praise, and is currently at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, with plans to continue traveling the US afterward.

“History is lived by people, and this exhibition gave us an opportunity to track the Great Migration’s impact through stories told by artists it shaped,” wrote Noah Simblist in an Art in America review.

“When Jess and I started working on the exhibition, our hope was to, as usual, support artists to dream and to really expand their practices through research and object-making,” Dennis said in an interview. “The tour’s life is just a blessing. To have the opportunity to talk more deeply to talk about the Great Migration in this country, especially right now, has been really a beautiful surprise.”

Prior to joining the Mississippi Museum, Dennis worked at another Houston art institution of a very different kind: Project Row Houses, the organization founded by artist Rick Lowe that places art inside shotgun houses. She had served as curator and programs director for that organization. Prior to that, she had been a curatorial assistant the Menil Collection.

“Ryan Dennis’s 10-year tenure in Houston at Project Row Houses and the Menil Collection is legendary, and it’s an honor to welcome her back to the city through this role,” said Hesse McGraw, CAMH’s director. “Ryan is a leading national curatorial voice whose work uniquely bridges artists and communities with institutions.”

Dennis said of her return to Houston, “Being gone for three years and coming back to serve the city and the city’s artists is really exciting. I’m really looking forward to what we can make pop.”