Christa Clarke is an independent curator/art historian and Senior Advisor at the Center for Curatorial Leadership.  Previously she was Senior Curator, Arts of Global Africa at the Newark Museum of Art, where her work was supported with major grants from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment of Humanities. During her sixteen-year tenure at Newark, she organized numerous exhibitions on topics ranging from men’s fashion to Nigerian modernism and established Newark’s significant collection of modern and contemporary African art, including major commissions by Yinka Shonibare CBE, Simone Leigh and Odili Odita.  Clarke was curator of African art at the Neuberger Museum of Art from 1999-2002 and has also served as consulting curator at Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Smith College Museum of Art, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Williams College Museum of Art, and the Memphis Brooks Museum.

In addition to her curatorial practice, Clarke has been a research fellow at the Smithsonian Institution, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harvard University, and the Clark Art Institute, and held teaching appointments at NYU Abu Dhabi, Boston University, University of Pennsylvania, George Washington University, Drew University and Rutgers University. In addition to The Activist Collector: Lida Clanton Broner’s 1938 Journey from Newark to South Africa (2023), her publications include Representing Africa in American Art Museums (2011, co-edited with Kathleen Berzock), the award-winning African Art at the Barnes Foundation (2015), and Arts of Global Africa: The Newark Museum Collection (2018), along with numerous essays and exhibition catalogues. From 2017 to 2019, Clarke served as president of the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC), of which she is now a lifetime trustee, and was a 2012 Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership. She received her B.A. from University of Virginia and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Maryland.

The Activist Collector: An African American Woman in Pre-Apartheid South Africa, is a collection formed by Newark resident Lida Clanton Broner during her extraordinary nine-month journey and its exhibitionary afterlives in the US.

This is a hybrid event. To join via Zoom, please register here.