Photo Credit: Miranda Barnes
Larry Ossei-Mensah, MOCAD’s Susanne Feld Hilberry Senior Curator uses contemporary art as a vehicle to redefine how we see ourselves and the world around us. The Ghanaian-American curator and cultural critic has organized exhibitions and programs at commercial and nonprofit spaces around the globe from New York City to Rome featuring such artist as Firelei Baez, Allison Janae Hamilton, Brendan Fernandes, Ebony G. Patterson, and Stanley Whitney to name a few. Moreover, Ossei-Mensah has actively documented cultural happenings featuring the most dynamic visual artists working today such as Derrick Adams, Mickalene Thomas, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Federico Solmi, and Kehinde Wiley.
Ossei-Mensah is also the co-founder of ARTNOIR a global collective of culturalists who design multimodal experiences aimed to engage this generation’s dynamic and diverse creative class. Ossei-Mensah is a contributor to the first ever Ghanaian Pavilion for the 2019 Venice Biennial with an essay on the work of visual artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.
Ossei-Mensah also recently co-curated, with Dexter Wimberly, the critically acclaimed exhibition at MOAD in San Francisco Coffee, Rhum, Sugar, Gold: A Postcolonial Paradox co-curated. Fall 2019 Ossei-Mensah will be curating his second exhibition at the Susanne Feld Hilberry Senior Curator at MOCAD Crossing Night: Regional Identities x Global Context with Josh Ginsburg from the A4 Arts Foundation and Jova Lynne, Ford Curatorial Fellow at MOCAD.
Ossei-Mensah has been profiled in publications including The New York Times, Artsy, and Cultured Magazine, which recently named him one of seven curators to watch in 2019. Follow him on Instagram/Twitter at @youngglobal or www.larryosseimensah.com
Mario Moore (b. 1987) lives and works in Detroit, MI. Moore received a BFA in Illustration from the College for Creative Studies (2009) and an MFA in Painting from the Yale School of Art (2013). He was recently awarded the prestigious Princeton Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University and has participated as an artist-in-residence at Knox College, Fountainhead residency and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.
Moore’s work has afforded him many opportunities– from multiple exhibitions and featured articles including the New York Times. His work is in several public and private collections which include the Detroit Institute of Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem and Princeton University Art Museum. Moore’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions including The Smart Museum, Chicago; the Smithsonian Museum traveling Sites Exhibition; Xavier University Art Gallery, New Orleans; the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids, MI; David Klein Gallery, Detroit; and the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, New York. He will have a solo survey exhibition at the Charles H. Wright Museum, Detroit, in 2021.