Jessica Hong is a curator and cultural worker who has dedicated her practice to highlighting under-recognized narratives and stimulating generational change within institutional sites. She is interested in rethinking curatorial practice to center the support of artists, mentorship, to build upon community, facilitate critical dialogues, while foregrounding collaboration, transparency, and equity.
Hong is the Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Toledo Museum of Art where she is responsible for broadening art historical narratives and shaping a dynamic collection and exhibitions program. At the TMA, she has organized the premiere of Stan Douglas’s major film installation Doppelgänger in a U.S. institution and Living Legacies: Art of the African American South. In the lead-up to the Museum’s historic reinstallation, Hong has acquired key works by Huguette Caland, Jeffrey Gibson, Kerry James Marshall, Remedios Varo, among others. In 2022, she was awarded Toledo’s 20 Under 40, which recognizes leaders in the community. Prior to the TMA, she was the Associate Curator of Global Contemporary Art at Dartmouth’s Hood Museum of Art and the first to fill this position on the occasion of the museum’s major expansion. In this inaugural role, she complicated the presumed temporal specificity of the “contemporary,” bridging collection areas across time and media in her exhibitions, to foster holistic understandings of our present. Hong made significant acquisitions for the HMA including works by Ho Tzu Nyen, Haegue Yang, and Zarina. Previously, she was Assistant Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston where she organized exhibitions including Arthur Jafa: Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death (2018) and the Boston presentation of We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85 (2018). During her tenure at the ICA, Hong organized and coordinated thirteen exhibitions along with corresponding publications, such as Huma Bhabha: They Live (2019), Mark Dion: Misadventures of a 21st Century Naturalist (2018), and Liz Deschenes (2017). Before the ICA, she was part of the new Division of Modern and Contemporary Art that launched the renovated Harvard Art Museums. She was previously based in New York and held curatorial positions at Independent Curators International (ICI), SculptureCenter, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Hong has written editorials and articles for BOMB Magazine, New England Museums Now, as well as Toledo Museum, Hood Museum, ICA/Boston, SculptureCenter, and Dartmouth publications. She was formerly ICI’s external evaluator for curatorial programs and has been a visiting lecturer at various academic institutions including Emerson College, Dartmouth College, Maryland College of Art, Lesley University, New York University, among others. Additionally, she continues to serve as a national critic and juror for numerous fellowships, awards, prizes, and residency programs and is a member of the U.S. Pavilion curatorial advisory committee for the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. Hong received her M.A. with Distinction in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and B.A. in art history from Barnard College, Columbia University, graduating Cum Laude and with Department Honors.
