Ashley James

Ashley James, Ph.D., is Associate Curator, Contemporary Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She is the curator of Off the Record (2021) and co-curator of The Hugo Boss Prize: Deana Lawson, Centropy (2021). Prior to joining the Guggenheim, James served as Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum, where she was the lead curator for the museum’s presentation of Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (2018–19), organized Eric N. Mack: Lemme walk across the room (2019), and co-curated John Edmonds: A Sidelong Glance (2020-21). James also served as a Mellon Curatorial Fellow in Drawing and Prints at the Museum of Modern Art, where her work focused on the groundbreaking retrospectives of Adrian Piper (2018) and Charles White (2018–19), and has held positions at the Studio Museum in Harlem and at the Yale University Art Gallery, where she co-organized the exhibition Odd Volumes: Book Art from the Allan Chasanoff Collection (2015). James holds a BA from Columbia University and a Ph.D. from Yale University in English literature and African American studies.