Kymberly Newberry

Kymberly S. Newberry teaches African American and African arts of the diasporas.

Students in Newberry’s courses encounter a dazzling array of artforms that reflect changing contexts and cultural entanglements, challenging antiquated belief systems and presenting new, vibrant ways of knowing. Taking cues from Linda Nochlin's classic feminist essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?,” Newberry’s course,

I Just Stay Out Until I Get In: African and African American Women Artists From Antiquity to Art Basel, tracks the dedication of African American and African diaspora women artists, their bold resistance in the male-dominated, Eurocentric art world, and their defiant declaration that they’ll ‘just stay out until they get in.’ In her course, Curating African and African American Art: Up from the Basement and into the Collection, students explore the social, cultural, racial and political elements that refract in the process of curating modern and contemporary African American and African arts of the diasporas.

While Assistant Curator of Special Projects at Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, she helped organize the exhibitions, vanessa german—THE RAREST BLACK WOMAN ON THE PLANET EARTH and Considering Indigeneity. In August 2022, Newberry curated the exhibition And I shall Spatter the Sky Utterly: Romauld Hazoumè.

Her primary research and scholarship explores contemporary African art as a ‘disruption’ and confronts the curatorial dilemmas of sensitive stewarding, accessioning and respectful contextualization and display of contemporary African art in Western art museums.

In 2021, Newberry was selected as Mellon fellow for the prestigious Center for Curatorial Leadership Seminar in Curatorial Practice.