Ep.260 Stephanie Sparling Williams is the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of American Art at the Brooklyn Museum. Before coming to the Brooklyn Museum, she was the Associate Curator at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, and a Visiting Lecturer in Art History and Africana Studies at Mount Holyoke College. Prior to her appointments at Mount Holyoke, she was the Assistant Curator at the Addison Gallery of American Art, and in 2016-2017, she was the John Walsh Fellow at the Yale University Art Gallery.
Sparling Williams has taught interdisciplinary courses on American Art, Art and African Americans, Latinx Art, and Museums and Exhibitions at Phillips Academy, Andover; the University of Massachusetts, Lowell; Eastern Connecticut State University, and Mount Holyoke College. She also holds the 2026 Anschutz Distinguished Fellowship in American Studies at the Effron Center for the Study of America at Princeton University. Her curatorial practice is predicated on interdisciplinary research, writing, and teaching on American art, and foregrounds Black Feminist space-making.
Her scholarly work is invested in the space of the museum, with a focus on African American art and culture, and the work of U.S.-based artists of color. Related interests include material histories, cross cultural exchange, strategies of address, and contemporary art that engages with the history of the United States.
Sparling Williams holds a M.A. and Ph.D. in American Studies and Ethnicity, and a certificate in Visual Studies from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She holds a B.A. in Fine Art and Ethnic Studies from the University of Colorado in Boulder.
Sparling Williams has published a monographic study on feminist conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady, and over two dozen academic articles, reviews, and catalogue essays. Her book on O’Grady, Speaking Out of Turn: Lorraine O’Grady and the Art of Language (UC Press 2021), was awarded 32nd Annual James A. Porter Book Award. Her recent work, Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art reimagines how contemporary audiences experience historic American art. Disrupting traditional presentations of art from the Americas and offering a new set of approaches to collection display and interpretation, this groundbreaking reinstallation and accompanying publication reframes 2,000 years of art drawn from the world-renowned holdings of the Brooklyn Museum.
