Connie Choi Appointed Chief Curator at the Barnes Foundation

The Barnes Foundation has appointed Connie Choi as its new Gund Family Chief Curator and Vice President for Art and Education, effective September 8, 2026. Choi arrives from nearly a decade at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she built a curatorial record grounded in artists, material histories, and cultures of the African diaspora. The Connie Choi Barnes Foundation position is newly created, and the departments it consolidates have been restructured around the hire.

Connie Choi at the Studio Museum: The Curatorial Record

Choi’s most recent projects at the Studio Museum include the first museum survey of artist Tom Lloyd (2025–26) — a significant institutional reckoning for a sculptor and electronic artist whose work had not previously received that kind of sustained scholarly attention — and From Now: A Collection in Context (2025–26), the largest collection exhibition in the institution’s history, organized for the opening of the Studio Museum’s new building in November 2025. She edited the inaugural publications for both.

Earlier in her Studio Museum tenure, Choi organized and co-curated Black Refractions: Highlights from The Studio Museum in Harlem (2019–21), a traveling exhibition whose catalogue received the Henry Allen Moe Prize from the New-York Historical Society in 2020. Her other exhibitions at the institution include Their Own Harlems (2017–18), Fictions (2017–18), and Regarding the Figure (2017). Before the Studio Museum, Choi was Assistant Curator of American Art at the Brooklyn Museum, with prior roles at the Hammer Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

She holds a PhD in art history and archaeology from Columbia University and an MEd from Harvard, has received a 2022 Center for Curatorial Research Fellowship and a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, and has taught at Barnard College, Columbia University, and Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. Her publications include Meaning Matter Memory: Selections from the Studio Museum in Harlem Collection (Phaidon, 2025) and the forthcoming Studio Museum in Harlem: A History (2026).

What the Connie Choi Barnes Foundation Appointment Signals

The structural detail behind Connie Choi’s appointment is worth noting. Barnes Executive Director Thom Collins has explicitly merged the curatorial, conservation, research, interpretation, and adult education departments under Choi’s VP-level leadership. She will also organize and publish her own curatorial projects alongside that institutional oversight — a combination of administrative authority and continuing scholarly output that is not common at this scale in American museum leadership.

The alignment is specific. The Barnes was founded in 1922 by Dr. Albert C. Barnes, who was actively engaged in the Harlem Renaissance and collaborated with philosopher Alain Locke on promoting awareness of African art — a founding orientation that has defined the collection’s character ever since. Choi’s decade at the Studio Museum in Harlem places her in direct conversation with that history, not as a coincidence of geography but as a continuity of curatorial intention.

Choi’s publication record tells you something about her priorities: the histories she chooses to document, the artists she argues deserve the sustained institutional attention of a monograph or survey. This is a curator who writes as carefully as she curates. At a museum whose founding logic was always about whose art belongs in the room and how it should be seen, the Connie Choi hire fits.