Delphine Sims

Photo by Lewis Watts

Delphine Sims is a PhD candidate in the History of Art Department at UC Berkeley, where she studies the history of photography in the Americas. Her research focuses on the ways in which race, gender, geography, and urbanity inform and redefine landscape photography. Currently, Delphine is the Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Andrew Wyeth Predoctoral Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts within the National Portrait Gallery. In 2019, she was the Mellon Curatorial Intern at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), during which time she helped organize the exhibitions Unlimited: Recent Gifts from the William Goodman and Victoria Belco Collection and About Things Loved: Blackness and Belonging. In 2018, she was a curatorial intern at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in the photography department. From 2013 to 2016, Delphine was a curatorial assistant in the photography department at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA). She has worked on numerous museum exhibitions and contributed writings to several publications including New Time: Art and Feminisms in the Twenty-first Century (BAMPFA), More Dreamers of the American Dream (Riverside Art Museum), Laurie Brown: Earth Edges (California Museum of Photography), and Looking In, Looking Out, Latin American Photography (SBMA). Her writing can also be found in Matte magazine, The Believer magazine, and Aperture. Delphine has organized and moderated many public programs for museums and art institutions including at San Francisco Camerawork, BAMPFA, and Autograph ABP (London, UK).

GM: What was your path towards becoming an arts professional?

DS: Born and raised in Riverside, California, I developed a keen sense of home and belonging, as both sides of my family were largely defined by migration and oral storytelling. My mother, the daughter of a Canadian father and Swiss mother, and my father, the son of parents who both arrived in California via the Great Black Migration, instilled in me a profound sense of narrative, community work, and commitment to visual culture. I first bridged these interests in a high school project, which explored imagery of the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, a largely ignored history that directly affected my paternal family and their later arrival in Southern California. My family has always visited museums to affordably access new stories and cultures, as well as prompt curiosity to seek out the stories that museums have failed to tell. These historical and personal interests partly led to my undergraduate studies at the University of Southern California, where I majored in Art History and American Studies and worked at the California African American Museum (CAAM). While neither department had specialists in Black visual culture, my research for exhibitions at CAAM led me to focus my seminar papers on Black representation, from lynching photography to Black Medieval iconography, and ultimately an honors thesis on three 20th-century Black women sculptors: Meta Warrick Fuller, Elizabeth Catlett, and Artis Lane. I also sought out other positions related to my budding interests, including internships at LACMA and the USC Fisher Museum, and time as a research assistant to photographer Sharon Lockhart. It was a final seminar paper on Robert Mapplethorpe’s The Black Book that truly solidified my commitment to photography, a passion project which, in tandem with my museum experience, landed me a position as a curatorial assistant in the department of photography at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art (SBMA). During my three years at SBMA, I grew as a connoisseur of photography under the late curator Karen Sinsheimer, learning the narrow canon of American and European photographers, building relationships with contemporary artists, and beginning to question the medium’s history. But there were limits to my interrogation of the history of photography and the role of the museum in shaping a fraught history of art, particularly as it related to critical race theory, which then led me to apply to graduate school. My path as an arts professional has been traditional in the sense that I have largely worked with and for museums, but nontraditional in terms of the art I am drawn towards and how I contextualize it. In each museum position, I have been eager to absorb the knowledge of my predecessors, while simultaneously interrogating and exposing the enumerable ways that art history as a discipline and the museum as a site has failed. This has become far more legible in my public facing work for institutions like the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, San Francisco Camerawork, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Autography ABP in London.

GM: You are currently a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley and the Andrew W. Mellon Art History Fellow at The Met. Can you discuss your studies and what you have been working on through these roles?

DS: Over the course of my graduate studies and alongside my work with museums, I have truly embraced my position as a photography historian. In the history of art PhD program at UC Berkeley, I am under the advisory of Dr. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby and Dr. Lauren Kroiz, and I work closely with Dr. Leigh Raiford in the African American Studies department. Studying under these incredible scholars has helped me constellate my interventions into the history of art and the history of photography, which is framed by Black feminist scholarship, material history, archive work, and exceptionally close-looking and formal analysis. I arrived at Berkeley knowing I wanted to explore the relationship between Blackness and landscapes in the United States.

Delphine visiting Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle's SECA Exhibition at SFMOMA (January 2020). Courtesy of Delphine Sims Over the last few years, I have focused that interest into a dissertation titled: (Re)Surfacing Black Presence: Photography, Black Women ’ s Bodies, and Geographies. I believe there is an imperative to not only add to the canon of photography, but also disrupt the established canon. I am committed to writing Black women artists into the history of photography as a way to equally instantiate their genius and support their work, so I use their art as a means to articulate the ways in which Blackness – Black life, labor, histories, and memory – is present in canonical American photography produced by white men. My dissertation considers a recent shift in Black aesthetics, wherein Black women artists rely on their own bodies to explore the relationship between Blackness, the land, and their chosen medium: photography. I examine the photographs of Carrie Mae Weems, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Nona Faustine, and Xaviera Simmons. I argue that through complex photographic self-portraits performed within American geographies, these Black women artists model recuperative projects that resurrect and imagine Blackness in physical geographies and landscape photography. (Continued)

Together, my project and these artists intervene into the history of photography by insisting on the geographic nature of their artwork, as well as the unexplored Black histories embedded in canonical American landscape photography. To do this work, I look at particular geographic sites that these aforementioned artists have photographed; I use their work to unearth Blackness in well-known photographs by white artists of the same or similar geographic location. My chapter on Carrie Mae Weems focuses on her 2004 series The Louisiana Project; I place her series in dialogue with Walker Evans’s 1935 photographs of vernacular plantation architecture. The Metropolitan Museum of Art houses the Walker Evans Archive, thus my current fellowship at the Met is to financially support my dissertation research and allow me consistent access to the Evans material. I’ ve also been in constant dialogue with Curator Jeff Rosenheim, who oversees the Evans archive. Discussions with Jeff have also helped me link my findings in the Evans archive with Weems’ artwork, all in service of new arguments and analysis of photographs of Louisiana plantation mansions.

GM: How do you center BIPOC artists in your practice?

DS: My career trajectory began with an expertise in African American art history, then learning an established, white canon of art history. Thus, when I think of artists who engage in certain themes or materials, I impulsively think of Black artists first. Growing up in a city with a majority Latinx population and a more visibly violent relationship to Indigenous people, I think that I am naturally drawn to artists and artworks that negotiate history and representation through their experiences. One of the best jobs of being a curator is the responsibility to see as much art as you possibly can in order to build a personal, internal, rolodex of sorts for a spectrum of artists that produce vastly different artwork. (Continued)

Delphine presenting an overview of her dissertation (Summer 2022). Courtesy of Delphine Sims

When the impulse to do so stems from a natural attachment and attraction to BIPOC artists, it’s much easier to curate or program with these artists in mind. That said, nearly all of my writing and public programming engages with Black artists and artists of color. I also make a concerted effort to meet with, listen to, and learn from Black elders who are artists and curators. They are such a wealth of knowledge and have witnessed and lived the same and far more experiences of exclusion and racism then I have. I feel an immense responsibility to archive their stories and do my best to share their work with others in order to celebrate their labor through exhibitions, acquisitions, and programming. I also write about them for art journals and magazines. Three artists I feel particularly committed to right now are Mildred Howard, the late James Oliver Mitchell, and Adgar Cowans. But I also know that part of curating is acknowledging one’s limitations and fully believing in the power of collaboration, so I expand my knowledge through respectful collaboration with incredible colleagues and friends across the field. Through this, I am able to growing as a curator, always expanding my awareness of BIPOC artists, as well as differently abled artists and LBTQIA+ artists.

GM: In your opinion, what could art institutions do to better engage with Black art and artists, especially in terms of exhibition organizing and programming thematics?

Delphine discussing Martin Wong's Silence (1982) in the "Way Bay 2" exhibition at BAMPFA (Summer 2018). Courtesy of Delphine Sims DS: This is a huge concern for me and the nexus of the work I do. It’s not just about critiquing museums but pushing myself to be imaginative and strategic in the ways I try to shift how museums work with Black art and artists. My sister is also a museum professional who works in history museums, and together we wrote an article about this question in the wake of most museums’ utter embarrassment and failures in their superficial responses to highlight Blackness and note anti-Blackness during summer 2020. We titled the article Where We At in reference to the incredible collective of Black women and women of color artists who convened in the 1970’s to put pressure on museums to represent and highlight Black artists and artists of color. (Continued)

Delphine standing between two exhibitions that she coorganized for BAMPFA: "Unlimited: Recent Gifts from the Victoria Belco and William Goodman Collection" and "About Things Loved: Blackness and Belonging" . Dr. Leigh Radford stands taking a picture of her in the background (Spring 2019). Courtesy of Delphine Sims

The whiteness of the institutions has been exposed time and time again, and yet museums continue to fail. Our article referenced some instances where Black folk have discussed the specifics of creating/recreating institutions whose foundations are to care for Black artists and the community. Thomas (T.) Jean Lax, Curator of Media and Performance at MoMA, once said their curation is defined by Black feminist thought. It was a simple statement but an essential and precise summary for my own art history and curation, which is to fundamentally care for people through and with art. If institutions learn with and alongside Black feminist care principles, they might be able to reimagine the tenets of their institutions to be one which supports, nurtures, celebrates, and centers Black folk. In thinking of great examples of this work in Los Angeles, we have The Underground Museum, Crenshaw Dairy Mart, CAAM, Art + Practice, and Summaeverythang, artist Lauren Halsey ’s community center. Finally, I want to move away from the survey exhibition and towards thoughtful and intensive thematic exhibitions. The exhibitions “Art of the Dirty South” , curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver, and “Legacies of the Great Migration” , co-curated by Jessica Bell Brown and Ryan Dennis, are exceptional examples of what it means to be attentive to the specificities of Black art production, themes, and complementary artists who intersect with these themes, rather than enormous, overwhelming survey exhibitions that bring a spectrum of Black art together merely by chronologies. Photography departments are exceptionally behind when it comes to producing survey exhibitions, let alone narrow and insightful thematic exhibitions, which makes me believe even more in the essentialness of my work. If and when I land at the right institution, I hope to implement consistent exhibitions and programs that are more incisive and consistent about the ways curators can exhibit, acquire, engage, and nurture Black artists and their art.

GIRLS MAGAZINE

BLACK GIRL MAGIC