Trevor Schoonmaker

Trevor Schoonmaker is the Director of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Hired in 2006 as its first contemporary art curator, he has been instrumental in shaping the museum’s curatorial vision and contemporary art collection. His Nasher Museum exhibitions include Reality of My Surroundings: The Contemporary Collection (2015), Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey(2013), The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl (2010), Christian Marclay: Video Quartet (2009), Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool (2008), and Street Level: Mark Bradford, William Cordova & Robin Rhode (2007). He most recently co-curated Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art with Miranda Lash, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. Southern Accent, on view until January 8, 2017 at the Nasher Museum, explores and reframes the way we look at the complex and contested space of the American South in contemporary art.

Prior to the Nasher Museum, Schoonmaker’s exhibitions included The Beautiful Game: Contemporary Art and Fútbol (with Franklin Sirmans, 2006), DTroit (2003), Black President: The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti (2003), and The Magic City (2000). His exhibitions have been presented at museums in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Miami, New Orleans, Houston, Cincinnati, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Manchester and London. He is the editor of several exhibition catalogues as well as the book Fela: From West Africa to West Broadway (2003). In 2001 he cofounded New York’s first Afrobeat club night Jump N Funk with DJ Rich Medina, and in 2013 he curated the artwork for Luaka Bop’s LP release of Who is William Onyeabor? Schoonmaker serves on the board of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.