Jeffrey Uslip is to leave his position as chief curator of Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. His departure comes shortly after accusations that a solo show of Kelley Walker at the American museum was racially insensitive. Walker’s exhibition features photos of black civil rights activists and black women which the artist smeared with whitening toothpaste and chocolate. Local artists called for a boycott of museum, with many pulling out of the institution’s annual open studio programme. One, Damon Davis, who attended a public conversation between Walker and Uslip, who are both white, posted a social media comment, since quoted by the St Louis Post-Dispatch, claiming ‘I don’t care that his work is controversial… much of my work is, but I can explain and stand by everything I make, he couldn’t and when asked he reacted like a child and a coward’.
Uslip has a new role at an as-yet unnamed institution.
18 November 2016
