Associate Curator Aysin Yoltar-Yildirim will contribute to the reinstallation of the Arts of the Middle East galleries; Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art Ashley James will be taking the lead on the upcoming exhibition 'Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, 1963-83.'
Photo credit: Jonathan Dorado
The Brooklyn Museum announced on Thursday two new curatorial appointments: Aysin Yoltar-Yildirim, associate curator of Islamic art who joined from Harvard Art Museums, and Ashley James, assistant curator of contemporary art and former Mellon Research Consortium fellow from the Museum of Modern Art.
"The Museum is thrilled to welcome both Aysin and Ashley to our team," stated Anne Pasternak, director of the Brooklyn Museum. "These appointments reflect our commitment as an encyclopedic institution to presenting the historical past with the radical present."
Aysin Yoltar-Yildirim joined the museum as the Hagop Kevorkian Associate Curator of Islamic Art and will contribute to the reinstallation of the Arts of the Middle East galleries and other projects relating to the arts of the Islamic World collection.
Prior to her appointment at the Brooklyn Museum, Yoltar-Yildirim was the assistant curator of Islamic and Later Indian Art at Harvard Art Museums. She holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in art history from NYU's Institute of Fine Arts and was a fellow and research assistant at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Yoltar-Yildirim has taught courses on the history of Islamic art in both the United States and her native Turkey.
Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art Ashley James, will be the curatorial lead on the upcoming exhibition "Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, 1963-83," organized by the Tate Modern in London.
James comes to the Brooklyn Museum from the Department of Drawings and Prints at the Museum of Modern Art where she was a Mellon Research Consortium fellow. She is a Ph.D. candidate in the Departments of African American Studies; English Literature; and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. She holds an M.A. and an M.Phil. in English literature, and an M.A. and an M.Phil. in African American studies from Yale, where she co-curated the 2014 University Art Gallery exhibition "Odd Volumes: Book Art from the Allan Chasanoff Collection."
The Brooklyn Museum also announced the establishment of two newly funded curatorial positions: the Phillip Leonian and Edith Rosenbaum Leonian Curator of Photography, and the Sills Family Consulting Curator for African Art.
