Alice Gray Stites is a curator and arts leader recognized for developing influential exhibitions and site-specific commissions that engage contemporary culture and public audiences. She is the founder of AGrayStites Projects, an initiative dedicated to curatorial, advisory, and advocacy work with artists and cultural organizations.
From 2012–2026 Stites served as Museum Director and Chief Curator of 21c Museum Hotels, a multi-venue contemporary art museum operating across several U.S. cities. During her tenure Stites curated more than fifty exhibitions, including Labor & Materials, The Future Is Female, The SuperNatural 2.0, Refuge: Needing, Seeking, Creating Shelter, Still, Life! Mourning, Meaning, Mending, and Revival: Digging Into Yesterday, Planting Tomorrow. She also oversaw numerous site-specific commissions by internationally recognized artists including Nick Cave & Bob Faust, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Daan Roosegaarde, SOFTlab, Freeman & Lowe, Chris Doyle, and Fallen Fruit, while overseeing the expansion of the museum’s permanent collection to more than 5,000 works.
Previously, Stites directed the nonprofit artwithoutwalls and served as adjunct curator of contemporary art at the Speed Art Museum. She has lectured widely at Art Basel Conversations, EXPO Chicago, the New Museum, TEDx Stockholm, Americans for the Arts, and FotoFocus. Stites is the author or editor of several books and more than one hundred essays on contemporary art. Her work has been recognized with the BOMB Magazine Salute Award and the University of Louisville Award for Inclusive Leadership in the Arts, and she was named to Observer’s Arts Power 50: The Changemakers Shaping the Art World.
Stites’s curatorial work explores the social, political, and material dimensions of contemporary art, foregrounding artists whose practices engage questions of identity, labor, ecology, and cultural memory.
