Curators Mindy Besaw and Ashley Holland will discuss the creation and ongoing exhibition project In Conversation: Will Wilson which premiered at Crystal Bridges of American Art in 2018 and has been traveling across the country as part of the Art Bridges Foundation traveling exhibition program since 2021. Their presentation will highlight the ongoing decentering of Edward Curtis’ The North American Indian through the lens of contemporary Indigenous artists such as Diné (Navajo) photographer Will Wilson.

Mindy N. Besaw, PhD, Curator, American Art and Director of Fellowships and Research, has been curator at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art since 2014 where Besaw oversees the American art collection covering colonial times to the 1960s, and the Tyson Scholars of American Art fellowship program. Her numerous projects and exhibitions include a 2018 renovation and reinstallation of the Early American art galleries; co-curator, with Candice Hopkins and Manuela Well-Off-Man, Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices 1950s to Now (2018); co-curator of Cross-Pollination: Martin Johnson Heade, Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church and our Contemporary Moment, organized in association with Thomas Cole Historic Site and Olana State Historic Site; and co-curator of Companion Species, an exhibition in partnership with the Museum of Native American History, Bentonville. She has written and lectured on a variety of topics and artists covering 19^th-to 21^st-century America, with a passion for art of the American West. Besaw holds a Ph.D. in American Art History from the University of Kansas.

Ashley Holland serves as the Curator & Director of Curatorial Initiatives for the Art Bridges Foundation. She is the former Assistant Curator of Native Art at the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis. Holland earned her doctorate in art history from the University of Oklahoma, Norman in 2021 with a focus on Indigenous identity, cultural memory, and issues of diaspora in Cherokee contemporary art. She received her MA in museum studies from Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis and BA in art history and religious studies from DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. Holland is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and currently lives in Rogers, Arkansas.

This program is made possible by generous support from Art Bridges.

Image: Will Wilson (b. 1969), Michelle Cook, Citizen of the Navajo Nation, UNM Law Student, 2013, printed 2018, archival pigment print from wet plate collodion scan, 22 x 17 in. Art Bridges. Photography by Brad Flowers.