MOCAD announces new curatorial fellow Jova Lynne

Detroit's MOCAD announced on Monday that Jova Lynne, a recent Cranbrook Academy of Art graduate and co-founder of Black Artists Meet Up Detroit group, will join the museum as its new Ford Curatorial Fellow in January, 2018.

According to a press release, Lynne is a "transdisciplinary artist and curator" of Jamaican and Colombian heritage" who was "born and raised in New York City in a household of artists and musicians." She arrived in Detroit in 2015 to pursue a Masters of Fine Arts in Photography at Cranbrook. Previously, she has worked at the Museum of Moving Image in Queens, New York, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Calif.

"MOCAD is a pillar in the arts community here in Detroit and I am incredibly excited to be a Ford curatorial fellow," Lynne says in a statement. "I look forward to working with a team dedicated to showcasing the works of world-class artists while exploring intersections between local, national, and international themes. I feel grateful to be given the opportunity to meet local artists while investigating and curating around the most important questions the contemporary art world faces today. I hope to come out of this fellowship with a strengthened understanding of the robust ways in which curation impacts the balance between exhibitions, public programs, and education in broadening the reach of the institution to the public."

Lynne joins Robin K. Williams as the museum's two Ford Curatorial Fellowship recipients. Williams started earlier in 2017 and helped co-curate the Sonic Rebellion exhibition. The fellowships are supported from a $120,000 grant from the Ford Foundation. A previous recipient, Scott Campbell, will soon complete his one-year fellowship.

According to a press release, the goal of the Ford Curatorial Fellowship is "to develop and deepen curatorial research in the Southeast Michigan among the artists who live and work in the region." The fellowship includes producing an exhibition accompanied by a publication and several public programs "that put diversity first and foremost in the discourse."