From left: Ryan N. Dennis. | Photo by Charles A. Smith; Melissa McDonnell Luján. | Photo by Fernanda Varela Rivera. Both Images Courtesy CAMH
Ryan N. Dennis and Melissa McDonnell Luján appointed co-directors of Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, effective January 2025
NEW LEADERSHIP is coming to Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH). Senior Curator and Director of Public Initiatives Ryan N. Dennis and Deputy Director Melissa McDonnell Luján have been appointed co-directors of the art museum in Houston, Texas, art museum. Dennis will become co-director and chief curator and Luján will serve as co-director and chief operating officer.
The promotions were announced this morning on the occasion of the departure of Hesse McGraw, the current executive director. McGraw is stepping down at the end of the year. Dennis and Luján will begin their new roles in January 2025.
In the new appointment announcement, CAMH stated that Dennis “will serve as the first Black Museum Director for the institution over its 76 year history.” It’s a historic milestone. Dennis, who was born in Houston and has spent most of her curatorial career in her hometown, will become one of the few Black people leading a mainstream art museum. Dennis is joining a select group, including Franklin Sirmans at Pérez Art Museum Miami; Andrea Barnwell Brownlee at the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens in Jacksonville, Fla.; Brooke A. Minto at Columbus Museum of Art; Belinda Tate at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields; and Sandra Jackson-Dumont at the forthcoming Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles. Last month, Linda C Harrison announced she was stepping down as director and CEO of the Newark Museum of Art, effective May 31, 2025.
Dennis joined CAMH in 2023 as senior curator and director of public initiatives. Earlier this year, she co-curated “Theaster Gates: The Gift and The Renege” (May 17-Oct. 20, 2024). The exhibition was part of the museum’s collaboration with Houston Freedmen’s Town Conservancy, a partnership she oversees. Freedman’s Town was founded in 1865 by formerly enslaved African Americans near Houston’s Buffalo Bayou and conservancy was established to preserve the town’s legacy. Dennis’s forthcoming projects include “Tomashi Jackson: Across the Universe,” which opens at CAMH on May 30, 2025.
At the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Ryan N. Dennis “will serve as the first Black Museum Director for the institution over its 76 year history.”
Exterior view of Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 2022. | Photo: Divya Pande, Courtesy CAMH
Previously, Dennis was chief curator and artistic director of the Center for Art & Public Exchange at the Mississippi Museum of Art (MMA) in Jackson, from 2020 to 2023. In addition to working on a solo exhibition of Betye Saar and a public art installation with Leonardo Drew, her greatest undertaking at MMA was co-curating the critically recognized traveling exhibition “A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration.”
In 2021, Dennis co-curated the Texas Biennial, presenting the work of more than 50 Texas artists in museums and art spaces spread across San Antonio and in collaboration with FotoFest in Houston. Dennis served curator and programs director at Project Row Houses (PRJ), a foundational experience from 2012 to 2020. PRJ is a groundbreaking public art organization that operates at the intersection of art, community, and neighborhood revitalization in Houston’s Third Ward, a mostly African American neighborhood.
In prior positions, Dennis was the traveling exhibition manager at the Museum for African Art in New York (now The Africa Center) and a curatorial assistant at The Menil Collection in Houston (2007‒2009). She received an undergraduate degree from the University of Houston and holds a master’s degree in arts and cultural management from Pratt Institute, with a focus in curatorial practice.
Luján also joined CAMH in 2023. Previously, she spent nine years at the Menil Collection in Houston, most recently was the director of project development. In an earlier role, she served as deputy director of Ballroom Marfa, the non-collecting contemporary art museum in in Marfa, a rural town in Far West Texas.
“We would like to thank Hesse for his dynamic leadership, steering CAMH through the uncertainty of the pandemic, furthering the Museum’s engagement with the community, and overseeing several landmark exhibitions, public programs, and partnerships,” CAMH Board Chair Ruth Dreessen said in a statement on behalf of the board of trustees. “We are excited to bring Ryan and Melissa on as Co-Directors. As instrumental players in the region’s arts ecosystem, and existing members of the CAMH community, Ryan and Melissa are perfectly positioned to lead the Museum with curatorial acumen and pioneering programming, further advancing CAMH’s place at the forefront of contemporary art.” CT
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BOOKSHELF
“A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration” was published on the occasion of the traveling exhibition co-curated by Ryan N. Dennis and Jessica Bell Brown. The catalog includes essays by Kiese Laymon, Jessica Lynne, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, and Willie Jamaal Wright. A second volume was also produced to accompany the traveling exhibition. “A Movement in Every Direction: A Great Migration Critical Reader” features historic writings by authors such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Jean Toomer, alongside contemporary texts by Toni Tipton-Martin, among others, and a roundtable discussion about personal family roots and related migration narratives among participating artists and writers and scholars, including Theaster Gates, Kiese Laymon, and Carrie Mae Weems. Also consider, “Collective Creative Actions: Project Row Houses at 25,” which was edited by Dennis.
