Jade Powers joined the Birmingham Museum of Art as the Hugh Kaul Curator of Contemporary Art in September 2023. In this role, she directs the growth and development of the BMA’s contemporary art collection of more than 3,200 works and implements contemporary art exhibitions. Previously she was the Curator of Contemporary Art at the Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville, Florida. There she spearheaded the reinstallation of community favorite public sculpture, Hammering Man at 2,938,405 by Johnathan Borofsky, was the on-site curator for the exhibition Posing Beauty in African American Culture, and acquired over 20 new works to the collection – 95% of which are works by women and artists of color. Prior to the Harn Museum, Powers was the assistant curator at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art where she organized the museum’s first exhibition spotlighting a Native artist, Dyani White Hawk: Speaking to Relatives, commissioned a large-scale atrium installation by Joiri Minaya, as well as nearly a dozen permanent and traveling exhibitions.
Powers has been a visiting critic at Washington University St. Louis, University of Kansas, and the Kansas City Art Institute, the visiting lecturer in the graduate studio art department at the University of Kansas (2020-2021), and a juror for several artist awards. She was also a member of the inaugural class of the Association of Art Museum Curators’ Professional Alliance for Curators of Color. She has been a featured writer in several catalogues including 2019 Charlotte Street Visual Artists Awards (2019), Dyani White-Hawk: Speaking to Relatives (2021), The Regional (2021), and Lamerol A. Gatewood (2021).
