Anni A. Pullagura

Anni A. Pullagura, PhD, is a scholar and curator of American art. She is currently based in Atlanta, GA, where she is the Margaret and Terry Stent Associate Curator of American Art at the High Museum of Art. Previously, she was the recipient of the inaugural postdoctoral research fellowship for modern and contemporary curators awarded jointly between the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and the Yale Center for British Art, Yale University, where she assisted on J. M. W. Turner: Romance & Reality and supported the museum's paintings and sculpture collections. As assistant curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, she organized the exhibitions Hew Locke: The Procession (co-curated with Ruth Erickson); 2023 James and Audrey Foster Prize; Jordan Nassar: Fantasy and Truth; Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca: Swinguerra; The Worlds We Make: Selections from the ICA Collection; and i'm yours: Encounters with Art in Our Times (co-curated with Eva Respini, Ruth Erickson, and Jeffrey De Blois). She has assisted on the organization of several national and international exhibitions and publications, including Simone Leigh; Simone Leigh: Sovereignty for the United States Pavilion, 59th Venice Biennale; Deana Lawson; A Place for Me: Figurative Painting Now; Revival: Materials and Monumental Forms; and When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migration through Contemporary Art, among others. An alum of the Center for Curatorial Leadership, she serves on the Art of the Americas Advisory Think Tank for the Harvard Art Museums and on the Editorial Council of Museums Moving Forward. 

 

An art historian of American visual and material cultures, aesthetics and critical theory, and global contemporary art, she holds a doctorate in American Studies from Brown University, as well as two masters in the History of Art and Architecture and Public Humanities, also from Brown University. Her forthcoming book manuscript, Seeing Feeling: Troubling Empathy in Contemporary Art, recasts the museum as the critical ground for engaging with the social and political dimensions of feeling and sentiment in the art encounter. She has held positions at numerous cultural institutions and arts organizations, including the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University; Megan Fox Kelly Art Advisory; Goodman Taft; Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture; Atlanta History Center; High Museum of Art; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others. Her research and curatorial practice has been supported by the Center for Curatorial Leadership; Association of Art Museum Curators; College Art Association; American Studies Association; Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research; Cogut Institute for the Humanities; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; and the Walton & Ford Foundations. Her writing has appeared in ASAP/Journal, History of Photography, Autre Magazine, Journal of Visual Culture, Art Journal Open, and Journal of American History, among others, as well as several exhibition and collection catalogues. 

 

Photo by Mel Taing