Tyler Blackwell (he/him) is Curator of Contemporary Art at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, KY, where he recently organized a major new reinstallation of the contemporary art collection. Previously, he served as the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Associate Curator at the Blaffer Art Museum—a leading contemporary art institute on the campus of the University of Houston. He has organized solo presentations and touring surveys with a range of artists, including major exhibitions of Monira Al Qadiri, Hugh Hayden, Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, Rodney McMillian, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Rebecca Morris, as well as focused shows of Maria A. Guzmán Capron, Jagdeep Raina, Jacqueline Nova, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, and Yoshua Okón. In 2021, Blackwell co-curated the group exhibition Carriers: The Body as a Site of Danger and Desire, which featured the work of fifteen Houston-area artists addressing issues of identity, community health, and social inequality. He is currently working towards exhibitions of Leslie Martinez and Jacolby Satterwhite, as well as the first major museum survey dedicated to the work of Marie Watt.
Blackwell previously held positions at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago and the Art Institute of Chicago’s Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, where he supported permanent collection acquisitions and the organization of wide-ranging exhibitions, commissions, programs, and performances. Blackwell holds a MA in Art History and The Humanities from the University of Chicago.
