News Release — For info contact Lori Melton, [email protected], 218-726-8830.
After an extensive search the Tweed Museum of Art announced the hiring of Karissa White as its new associate curator. She will take on the mantle of her new position beginning in July of this year.
White offers the Tweed Museum a wide-ranging museological background, as well as a rare intellectual discipline in assessing and interpreting objects according to social and historical contexts. Her vast knowledge of history, and her experience with exhibitions, programming, administration, and basic research—not to mention teaching in museum studies has established solid credentials which, along with exceptional artistic and innovative skills, are characterized by a balance of practical training and advanced interdisciplinary scholarship
Karissa White is an enrolled member of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe and is currently an assistant professor of Native American Studies and, the Indigenous Cultures Center Museum coordinator at Northland College in Ashland, Wisc. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Hamline University and a Masters in Museology from University of Washington-Seattle. After her masters was completed, White worked as curator for the newly-built Squaxin Island Tribe's Museum, Library and Research Center where she developed museum policies and exhibits and worked with tribal artists in the Pacific Northwest. After Seattle, White returned to Lac Courte Oreilles to serve at the tribal Cultural Center prior to entering into the University of Minnesota American Studies program, where she earned a Ph.D. in 2013.
Marsha Anderson, a widely respected independent curator and retired senior curator at the Minnesota Historical Society, said of White that, “her professional competences are richly infused with her experiences gained as a contributing member of the Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation community, as a Ph.D. graduate student, as scholar, curator, museum educator and exhibit developer, lover of public history, and successful and inspiring professor at the University of Minnesota at Morris, and Northland College.”
The staff of the Tweed Museum has been organizing and running its programs for over a period of two years with the help of guest curators. The addition of Dr. White to the staff will provide a greater degree of operational continuity and invigorate the overall dimension of Museum programming to include underrepresented and indigenous artists, and to expand the range of interpretive perspective on collection objects.
- Visit the Tweed Museum of Art website.