ARTIST STATEMENT
Our ancestors’ success as predators and failure as prey are encoded in our DNA. The familial, cultural, and environmental dynamics of decisive moments are inscribed in our bodies and minds. These unconscious memories actively shape our beliefs, outlooks, postures, and gestures. With each generation removed from a defining event, details become blurry and are eventually, forgotten. We think and act from a reservoir of memories that we cannot consciously access.
My work looks for traces of these memories and scours them for meaning. I scan for drivers of behavior and comportment over time, both in my personal family history and human history more generally. I plumb objects, forms, and materials that were present in predecessors’ lives, especially my female ancestors’ lives, to imagine how bodies interacted with their surroundings. I re-present these things as sculpture, installation, photography, video, and drawing. These new circumstances allow me to share what the objects, forms, and materials have taught me about inherited thought and movement.
THE ARTIST
Kristina V Fort is trained as an art historian specializing in African art and was formerly a curator and museum director. She has a love of objects and research, an understanding of the significance of context and modes of presentation, and an ability to think broadly about the creation of ongoing bodies of work. Kristina is currently pursuing an MFA at Maine Media and splits her time between New Hampshire, New Mexico, and West Texas.
EDUCATION
MFA candidate
Maine Media, Rockport, ME, expected November 2024
Professional Certificate in Visual Storytelling
Maine Media, Rockport, ME, May 2021
PhD History of Art and Architecture
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, June 2005
MA Art History
Williams College, Williamstown, MA, June 1999
BA International Relations
University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, May 1994
MUSEUM EXPERIENCE
Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, MO
Director, 2011-2015
The Menil Collection, Houston, TX
Curator for Collections and Research, 2009-2011
Associate Curator for Collections, 2005-2009
Assistant Curator for Collections, 2005
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
Look Again: Contemporary Perspectives on African Art, guest curator, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2016
Kota: Digital Excavations in African Art, co-curator with Frederic Cloth, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, 2015-2016
African gallery installation, guest curator, Harvard Art Museums, 2014
The Progress of Love, co-curator with Bisi Silva and Francesca Consagra Herndon, The Menil Collection; Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos; Pulitzer Arts Foundation, 2012-2013
Reinstallation of Pacific Arts Gallery, curator, The Menil Collection, 2011
Reinstallation of the African Galleries, curator, The Menil Collection, 2008
Chance Encounters: the Formation of the de Menils’ African Collection, curator, The Menil Collection, 2006
HONORARY APPOINTMENTS
University of Houston, Houston, TX
Honors College, Research Assistant Professor, 2015 - 2018
Washington University, St. Louis, MO
Department of Art History, Guest Scholar, 2012 - 2015
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
“The Body in African Art,” essay for The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art, David Bindman and Suzanne Preston Blier, eds., (Cambridge: Harvard University, 2017)
“Primary Sources: Objects as Evidence,” Tribal Art, Special Issue 5 (2015): 9 – 11
The Progress of Love (exhibition catalogue), editor and contributing author (Houston: The Menil Foundation, 2012)
“Figurative Terra Cotta Sculptures,” essay on Malian antiquities and catalogue entries in African Terra Cottas, A Millenary Heritage (Geneva: Musée Barbier-Mueller and Somogy éditions, 2009): 70 – 95, 422 – 427
African Art from The Menil Collection, editor and contributing author (Houston: The Menil Foundation, 2008)
“Demanding Objects: Malian Antiquities in Western Museums,” RES 52 (2007): 141-152
“African Art at The Menil Collection,” African Arts 40 (Autumn 2007): 36-49
“Beyond Monument Lies Empire: Mapping Songhay Space in the 11th-16th Centuries,” RES 48 (2005): 33-44
SELECTED BOARD + INSTITUTIONAL SERVICE
Board Member, Georgia O’Keefe Museum, Santa Fe, NM (2019 – present)
Board Member, SmartHistory (digital resource for art history), New York, NY (2016 – 2020)
