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Key Jo Lee

@keyjolee

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Chief of Curatorial Affairs and Public Programs @moadsf
New Book: Perceptual Drift: Black Art and an Ethics of Looking

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A new season is on view at @moadsf.

Opened together during the third annual @nexussfbay, these three exhibitions ask how Black life holds on to what matters across decades, oceans and generations, and how artists remake it in their own hands.

Dewey Crumpler: Sonic Lineages spans more than five decades of @deweycrumpler’s practice, placing paintings made years apart in conversation with new kinetic works. The exhibition changes as you walk through it, across all three floors.

After the Island: Ornament and Ceramic Practice in the Jamaican Diaspora brings together @pjandersonceramics, @bishopjacqueline and @sharonnorwoodartist, whose work asks us to look past decoration and consider what a surface can hold. Presented in partnership with @blackartndialog and @gardinermuseum.

Dorian Reid: Calling All Cats! introduces our MoAD Emerging Artist and the Black Cat Revolution. It is playful, intimate and unmistakably hers.

We can’t wait to welcome you. Plan your visit at moadsf.org, link in bio.

#MoAD #SonicLineages #AfterTheIsland #CallingAllCats #BayAreaArt by @keyjolee

Museum of the African Diaspora’s CEO and Executive Director Monetta White (@monettawhite) and Chief of Curatorial Affairs and Public Programs Key Jo Lee (@keyjolee) recently spoke with Robin Pogrebin (@rpogrebin) for The New York Times (@nytimes) about how the museum remains steadfast in its mission to champion artists of African descent amid national rollbacks in support for cultural and arts organizations.

Earlier this month, we reopened to the public after a six-month closure for building renovations and internal upgrades. We celebrated our return with the second annual Nexus: SF/Bay Area Black Art Week (@nexussfbay) and two new exhibitions—UNBOUND: Art, Blackness & the Universe and Continuum: MoAD Over Time. White shared with Pogrebin, “We’re staying true to our roots while evolving… creating programs that speak to both the imagination and the lived realities of our community.”

As we reopened, we also introduced a new mission statement: “To place the contemporary art and artists of the African Diaspora at the center of the global cultural conversation.” This shift reflects not only what we present, but how we tell our story.

In our latest presentation, UNBOUND: Art, Blackness & the Universe, Lee brings this mission to life—centering the perspectives, ideas, and creative expressions of Black artists as vital contributors to global conversations about art, identity, and the cosmos. She shares; “artists not only reflect universal knowledge…but can also create new knowledge and understanding of cosmology — this kind of human drive toward understanding our place in the universe.”

Read the full article now via the link in bio.

Explore our current exhibitions and learn more about our upcoming programs and events with the link in bio.

Photos by: Cayce Clifford for The New York Times.

#MoAD #MuseumOfTheAfricanDiaspora #UNBOUND #Continuum #MoAD20 #NexusSFBay #BayArea #BlackArtWeek #BlackArt #AfricanDiaspora #MonettaWhite #KeyJoLee #ArtExhibition #BlackArtists #ContemporaryArt #SanFranciscoArt by @keyjolee

Black art museums carry generations of hope on their shoulders.

The 2005 opening of @moadsf, for instance, was decades in the making and owing to the tenacity of Willie Brown, the city’s first Black mayor, who—together with a team of community members—understood that after years of urban renewal in the 1970s and 1980s led to the gutting and razing of Black neighborhoods, Black San Franciscans needed a permanent place to call their own.

The ambitions of Black museums are often met with challenges, including a near-perfect storm of financial pressures, which has forced the development of out-of-the-box fundraising strategies. The unprecedented scrutiny of any race-driven mission by the current U.S. administration has only made that paradigm worse.

So let’s use this moment to consider: What is a Black museum’s impact in 2026? How does that impact translate to funding? And how do these institutions—even in our most challenging cultural and political chapters—still find room to preserve and build on their legacies?

To answer these questions, CULTURED assembled a roundtable of three Black women in key roles at some of the most well-respected Black institutions in the U.S.: @keyjolee of the aforementioned Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco; @cheryl__finley, of the Atlanta University Center Art History and Curatorial Studies Collective (@auc_artcollective); and Amy Andrieux (@missaimstar) of the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (@mocada_museum) in New York.

For CULTURED, these women share what led them to their current roles, why they remain committed, and how, in moments like these, it’s even more urgent, as Andrieux puts it, “to raise the volume and stay loud.” Link in bio to read their conversation now.

Words: Melissa Smith by @keyjolee

On view now at Museum of the African Diaspora — Calling All Cats! by Dorian Reid (@niadartcenter), part of MoAD’s 10th Emerging Artist Program cohort, now in its third presentation.

At the center of Calling All Cats! is the black cat, a creature long followed by superstition and suspicion. In Reid’s hands, the cat carries dignity, wit, tenderness, and agency, appearing as artist, neighbor, witness, troublemaker, and friend. The exhibition tells the story of the “Black Cat Revolution,” a movement and club Reid founded in 2024 to dismantle prejudice and raise funds for cats and community members.

Born and raised in Berkeley, Reid draws parallels between her family’s connection to the Black Panthers and her own fight for civil rights and animal welfare. Across ceramics, paintings, prints, textiles, furniture, and protest signs, she builds a world full of family, musicians, activists, neighbors, and cats of every color, joyful, intimate, and gloriously its own.

Join Reid for Eliminate Superstition Right Meow! A Friday the 13th Protest, in person at MoAD on Saturday, November 14, 2026, from 2:00–4:00 PM. Make your own protest sign, then march with Reid around the neighborhood in song and chant. Free admission, all ages welcome.

Discover more and plan your visit via the link in bio.

Black Cat Revolution Right Meow! 🐈‍⬛

#DorianReid #CallingAllCats #EmergingArtistProgram #BlackArt #MoAD by @keyjolee

One of the pleasures of curating After the Island has been watching a friendship become an institutional collaboration. @srtmv and I have known each other since graduate school, and this project gave us the chance to bring our curatorial perspectives together around Caribbean ceramicists working in North America. Sequoia introduced me to the brilliant Joséphine Denis of @blackartndialog, and our partnership took shape as two related exhibitions: After the Island: Ornament and Ceramic Practice in the Jamaican Diaspora at @moadsf and After the Island: Caribbean Canadian Ceramics at @gardinermuseum.

At MoAD, I brought together @sharonnorwoodartist, @bishopjacqueline, and @pjandersonceramics because each approaches Jamaica so differently: as experience, as inheritance, as cultural touchstone. Sharon’s curling line brings the Black body into conversation with histories of porcelain and its display. Jacqueline places “banana men” and “market women” at the center of elaborately decorated plates, honoring the people whose labor has sustained the Americas. PJ’s coiled vessels meet woven paper and fiber, connecting her Afro-Jamaican and Red River Métis heritage.

I wanted the installation to feel intimate and generous, an invitation to linger with the beauty of these objects and discover the histories their surfaces hold. Our companion zine carries that conversation across both presentations and beyond the museum. For me, that spirit of exchange is what gives the project its life.

After the Island is on view at the Museum of the African Diaspora through May 30, 2027.

Learn more and plan your visit at moad.org, link in bio.

#AfterTheIsland #MoAD #CaribbeanCeramics #JamaicanDiaspora #BlackArtHistory by @keyjolee

Earlier this month, from September 30 through October 4, the Bay Area came alive with Black art, culture, and creativity for the third annual Nexus: SF/Bay Area Black Art Week, organized by the Museum of the African Diaspora (@moadsf)!

More than 200 exhibitions, artist talks, open studios, film screenings, performances, and gatherings brought together over 100 artists and 80 cultural organizations and venues, drawing more than 2,500 attendees. This year also welcomed artists and creative voices from Los Angeles, strengthening the connections between Northern and Southern California.

At MoAD, three new exhibitions opened during the week: “Dewey Crumpler: Sonic Lineages,” “After the Island: Ornament and Ceramic Practice in the Jamaican Diaspora,” and “Calling All Cats! by Dorian Reid.” The week culminated in the Afropolitan Ball at San Francisco’s Ferry Building, where Crumpler received the inaugural MoAD Vanguard Award.

What made this year especially meaningful was seeing the connections being made between artists and audiences, institutions and communities, and people discovering new spaces and creative voices. Every participating organization and every program contributed to something larger than any one event.

Our heartfelt thanks to the artists, partners, sponsors, supporters, and everyone who showed up. Together, we’re showing the world what this region has always known: the Bay Area is a vital center for Black art, culture, and creativity.

See you at @nexussfbay 2027!

#Nexus #BayAreaBlackArtWeek #MoAD #BlackArt #BlackArtists by @keyjolee

Snippets. Y’all. What a two weeks! I will add details later, but wanted to share this little visual diary. SFO - CLÉ - YYZ and back again. Did you know there is a simultaneous After the Island exhibition in Toronto @gardinermuseum ?!curated by @srtmv and @josephinedenis it also includes the great Eddy Firmin and Manuel Mathieu. What happens when three curators from three very different art institutions collaborate? #curatorbaeinthebay #keejleavesthehouse by @keyjolee

COMING SOON to MUSEUM OF THE AFRICAN DIASPORA—Dorian Reid: Calling All Cats!, the next exhibition in MoAD’s Emerging Artist Program.

Dorian Reid is a Berkeley-born multidisciplinary artist working across ceramics, paintings, prints, textiles, furniture, and protest signs. She is the daughter of historian and public servant Betty Reid Soskin, and her family also owned Reid’s Records, the beloved Berkeley record store. That inheritance runs through her work, where family history becomes folklore, portraiture records kinship, and art enters public life.

At the center of Calling All Cats! is the black cat—a creature followed for centuries by superstition and suspicion. In Reid’s hands, the cat carries dignity, wit, tenderness, and agency, appearing as artist, neighbor, witness, troublemaker, and friend. The exhibition tells the story of the “Black Cat Revolution,” a movement and club Reid founded in 2024 to dismantle prejudice and raise funds for cats and community members.

Come for the cats. Stay for the world they have built around them.

Calling All Cats! opens at Museum of the African Diaspora on September 30, 2026 and is on view through December 6, 2026, on Floor 2 in the CommonSpirit Health Gallery.

To learn more about Dorian Reid: Calling All Cats! and MoAD’s Emerging Artist Program, click the link in bio.

#DorianReid #CallingAllCats #EmergingArtistProgram #BlackArt #ContemporaryAr by @keyjolee

UNBOUND: Art, Blackness & the Universe affirmed the power of approaching Blackness through wonder, curiosity and expansiveness. It was profoundly moving to see people engage so deeply with a set of questions that began as a personal intellectual obsession and grew into an exhibition spanning the entire museum. I am deeply grateful to the artists, lenders, supporters and MoAD team whose imagination and labor brought such an ambitious exhibition to life.

The exhibitions opening this fall at @moadsf during @nexussfbay carry several of UNBOUND’s inquiries forward.

Dewey Crumpler’s Sonic Lineages explores cosmology, improvisation and nonlinear time through painting and sculpture. After the Island: Ornament and Ceramic Practice in the Jamaican Diaspora turns to Caribbean ceramics to consider how memory, ancestry and cultural knowledge travel across distance and generations. In the Emerging Artists Program salon, Dorian Reid: Calling All Cats! carries that spirit of curiosity into a distinct artistic world of its own. Together, these exhibitions continue our exploration of Black life as expansive, relational and continually remade.

Thank you to everyone who stood with us at the edge of the known universe and dared to imagine what lies beyond. We can’t wait to welcome you back this fall for Dewey Crumpler: Sonic Lineages with @deweycrumpler, and After the Island, featuring new and recent work by @sharonnorwoodartist, @bishopjacqueline, and @pjandersonceramics, presented in partnership with @blackartndialog and @gardinermuseum.

#MoAD #UNBOUND #SonicLineages #AfterTheIsland #DeweyCrumpler by @keyjolee

For the past several years, working with @deweycrumpler has been a little like stepping into one of his paintings: the conversation can move from jazz and blues and African cosmology to physics, politics, memory, and Black life in the Bay Area, with every idea connected.

That kind of wide-ranging exchange is what Sonic Lineages grew out of, his forthcoming solo presentation at @moadsf. Rather than telling a straightforward, chronological story, I was excited to shape an exhibition that moves through more than five decades of work like a musical composition.

For me, it has been a chance to think alongside a remarkable artist. And it insists Dewey’s work is central to contemporary American art history.

Dewey Crumpler’s Sonic Lineages is on view at the Museum of the African Diaspora from September 30, 2026 to May 30, 2027, and is presented during the third annual @nexussfbay.

Learn more and plan your visit at moad.org, link in bio.

Captured by @tinashe.arts.

#DeweyCrumpler #SonicLineages #MoAD #BayAreaArt #BlackArtHistory by @keyjolee

This past weekend, we hosted our annual Diaspora Dinner: Sips & Soul at The St. Regis San Francisco.

Guests gathered for an evening that felt less like a dinner and more like a homecoming — food, wine, and storytelling woven together across the African Diaspora. Sommelier Cha McCoy (@cha_squared) poured wines that reframed what a “classic” pairing could look like, chef Amethyst Ganaway (@thizzg) brought the tastes of her Gullah Geechee roots to every course, and Gabrielle Davenport (@warm_brie) of BEM | books & more (@bembrooklyn) guided the room through conversation on memory, migration, and joy.

We’re so grateful to the wineries who shared their craft and their stories with us: Brown Estate Vineyards (@brownestate), Edmonds Estates, Hedon State Wines (@hedonstate), McBride Sisters Collection (@mcbridesisterscollection), Overshine Wine Co. (@overshinewineco), and P. Harrell Wines (@pharrellwines).

MoAD gratefully acknowledges the generous support of our sponsors, whose commitment makes this evening possible: Dare Arowe, Noelle Bonner, Lucey Bowen and Richard Sites, Robert Davenport, Carolyn Doelling, Theo Ellington and the Ruth Williams Bayview Opera House, Karla Haynes, Lilian Mworia, Madlyn Norman-Terrance, Sonjia Redmond, Repossessionsart.com, Kelly Tanner Jones and Kevin Jones, Cheryl and Charles Ward, Justin Williams and Chahinaz El-Masri, and The St. Regis San Francisco.

#DiasporaDinner #SipsAndSoul #MoAD #BlackOwnedWineries #DiasporicFoodways by @keyjolee

COMING SOON to MUSEUM OF THE AFRICAN DIASPORA—Dewey Crumpler: Sonic Lineages.

The first major museum exhibition to frame the continuity of Crumpler’s artistic and philosophical practice through this sonic logic, Sonic Lineages approaches more than five decades of his work as a composition: ideas recur, forms echo across time, and repetition produces variation. The exhibition brings paintings from multiple periods into relation with newly realized kinetic works.

Crumpler (b. 1949, Arkansas) has called the Bay Area home for most of his life—his practice began here as a city muralist, studying under Pablo Esteban O’Higgins and David Alfaro Siqueiros, and grew into a body of work now held in the permanent collections of SFMOMA, the Oakland Museum of California, the Triton Museum of Art, and the California African American Museum, and featured in the Tate Modern’s 2017 Soul of a Nation. For decades, Crumpler also taught painting at the San Francisco Art Institute, where his students included Kehinde Wiley and Deborah Roberts.

The “sonic” here is not exclusive to sound. Rhythm, repetition, variation, improvisation, and duration shape the exhibition. Shipping containers, hoodies, voids, metallic surfaces, and moving forms appear, disappear, and return across decades as Crumpler investigates Black consciousness, commerce, spirituality, African cosmologies, memory, and time.

At its center is Crumpler’s conception of “absolute autonomy”: the capacity of forms and ideas to remain fluid, entering new relationships without surrendering their integrity. Like a musical phrase, a form can be repeated, varied, improvised upon, and brought into relation with others while retaining its own voice.

On view September 30, 2026 – May 30, 2027. Curated by Key Jo Lee.

Learn more and plan your visit (link-in-bio).

#DeweyCrumpler #SonicLineages #MoAD #BayAreaArt #BlackArtists by @keyjolee