CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS and the NEXT GENERATION:  Tyler Shine, Tiffany Sims, and Alyssa Velazquez in Conversation

CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS and the NEXT GENERATION:  Tiffany Sims, Tyler Shine, and Alyssa Velazquez in Conversation

Saturday, June 28th, 2025 at 2pm

Moderated by Kilolo Luckett

FREE! And Open to the Public

Join us to explore some exciting developments in the curatorial and art history fields around contemporary art. Sims, Shine, and Velazquez will share their emergent perspectives on the importance of building intergenerational networks and environments of care in museums and cultural institutions. Moderated by Kilolo Luckett, Executive Director and Chief Curator, ALMA | LEWIS

Photo Credit: María de Los Angeles Rodríguez Jiménez, Mask iii (Ochos & Appalachia) video still, 2024, Single-channel video, Documentation by Tajh Rust, Courtesy of the artist.

Tyler Shine

Tyler Shine is an art historian of twentieth-century art, architecture, and material culture with interests in the African diaspora, landscape studies, and the intersections of visual art and popular culture. He is a PhD candidate in the History of Art Department at the University of Pennsylvania where his dissertation explores how art and design function as mnemonic devices to remember Black landscapes. Tyler has held a variety of positions in museums including The Phillips Collection, the Andy Warhol Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. He was the inaugural Constance E. Clayton Fellow in the Prints, Drawings and Photographs Department at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from 2016 to 2018.

Currently, he is the Will Barnet Foundation Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and this fall will be a Woodson Fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute in the Department of African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia.

Tiffany Sims

Tiffany Sims (b. 1998) is an art historian, curator, and independent researcher. Her research draws upon her dance background as a way to analyze the historical narratives of the Black body in the African diaspora, as well as a way to center embodiment in histories of modern and contemporary art. Through the lens of Black feminist theory, she considers questions that expand upon gesture, movement and memory, race, and racism in order to call attention to artists and performers whose work on the body emphasizes the political dimensions of Blackness.

Tiffany is the Administrative and Program Coordinator at ALMA | LEWIS. She was previously the Margaret Powell Curatorial Fellow at Carnegie Museum of Art from 2022 – 2024. The fellowship gave her an understanding of and opportunity for curation, programming, and research. Within the fellowship she explored themes of memory and movement through photography and performance, and how performance artists of color use their bodies as an enactment of the past, present, and future. She was also a Hot Metal Bridge Post Baccalaureate Fellow in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. She holds a BA in Art History from University of Florida, Gainesville and an AA from Broward College. She will be continuing her education in the Fall at Tulane University for a MA in Africana Studies/Art History.

Alyssa Velazquez

Alyssa Velazquez is a cultural historian, playwright, actress, and writer of gender, performance, and material culture. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Material Intelligence, The Tower, Scraps Literary Journal, The Establishment, AutoStraddle, GRLSQUASH, The Fashion Studies Journal, Women’s History Magazine, Juggad: A Material Religions Project, and the Votive Project. Past residencies include Lambda Literary Writer’s Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices 2024, City Books Writer-in-Residence, and as a Freshworks Artist at Kelly Strayhorn Theater in Pittsburgh, PA. She is a proud member of Dramatists Guild of America. She holds a MFA from the Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, and a BA from Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland.

Kilolo Luckett

Kilolo Luckett is a Pittsburgh-based art historian and curator, and the Executive Director and Chief Curator of ALMA | LEWIS. With more than twenty-five years of experience in arts administration and cultural production, she is committed to elevating the voices of underrepresented visual artists, especially women, and Black and Brown artists.

She has curated exhibitions by national and international artists such as Peju Alatise, Martha Jackson Jarvis, Thaddeus Mosley, Tajh Rust, Devan Shimoyama, and Shikeith. She served as an Art Commissioner for the City of Pittsburgh’s Art Commission for twelve years.  Luckett has held positions as Curator of Meta Pittsburgh’s Open Arts, Consulting Curator of Visual Arts at the August Wilson African American Cultural Center, Director of Development at The Andy Warhol Museum, and Curatorial Assistant at Wood Street Galleries, where she helped organize shows that included Xu Bing, Louise Bourgeois, Larry Bell, Catherine Opie, Nam June Paik, and Tim Rollins + K.O.S.

Among her published work, Luckett is most proud of her recent 2023 exhibition publication, Stephen Towns: Declaration & Resistance. She is also writing an authorized biography on Naomi Sims, one of the first Black supermodels.