July 13, 2023 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Delta Voices 2023 brings curators and artists together for a lively discussion on contemporary art in our region.
This year’s edition will feature curators from the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Philbrook Museum of Art, and AMFA in conversation with artists from the Mid-South region.
AMFA Members are invited to enjoy cocktails and mingling before the event starting at 4:00 p.m. in the Cultural Living Room. Your first drink is free – just show your membership card at check-in to receive a drink ticket.
Delta Voices and the Delta Exhibition seek to heighten the visibility of artists from the region, reflect shifts in the cultural landscape, and amplify creative voices at the forefront of contemporary art.
In 2024, the Delta Exhibition will return to AMFA as a triennial in the newly expanded galleries. Watch the announcement video.
Live open captioning will be available during this event.
Delta Voices is supported by Friday, Eldredge & Clark, LLP and the Andre Simon Memorial Trust Fund in memory of everyone who has died of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS).
Meet the Artists
Anthony Sonnenberg / Selected by the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts
Born in 1986 in Graham, Texas, Anthony Sonnenberg earned a BA with an emphasis in Italian and Art History in 2009 and an MFA in Sculpture from the University of Washington, Seattle in 2012. His work which ranges from porcelain to performance has been shown across the United States and Internationally. Sonnenberg lives and works in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
Notable recent exhibitions include: State of the Art II, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (2020); I’m Going to Dance the Way I Feel – Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, FL (2021) Ceramics Now – Galerie Italienne – Paris, France (2021) Cannons Hidden in Flowers, Gavlak Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2023).
Notable Residences include: Windgate Museum Of Art Inaugural Artist-In-Residence (2021); CSULB-CCC Summer Resident Artist, California State University, Long Beach, CA (2018); Yaddo Artist Residency – Saratoga Springs, NY (2017); Resident at Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Houston, TX (2016) Emerging Artist in Residence at Pilchuck Glass School, Stanwood, WA (2012).
Keli Mashburn / Selected by Philbrook Museum of Art
Keli Mashburn is a photographer and video artist. Born in 1977, she grew up on a ranch on the Osage Reservation in northeastern Oklahoma, developing an appreciation and deep respect for the prairie-plains landscape of her home.
Utilizing the Tallgrass Prairie as metaphor, her experimental short films illustrate an exuberant continuity with the past and a profound hope for the future. The fragmented, non-linear narratives of her work navigate a highly complex worldview, expressing a sophisticated and imaginative intellectual tradition to inspire a sense of purpose and discovery, or rediscovery of bonds and relationships.
Mashburn’s films have screened nationally, at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, California, at the inaugural exhibition of OK Contemporary in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and in New York City at the National Museum of the American Indian.
She has presented her work internationally on the occasions of the 2015 and 2017 Venice Biennales in Venice, Italy.
Francisco Moreno / Selected by Amon Carter Museum of American Art
Francisco Moreno was born in Mexico City in 1986. In 2006, he attended the Conceptual Design Summer Program at the Tecnológico de Monterrey, Querétaro Campus in Mexico.
Moreno returned to Arlington to complete his Bachelor in Fine Art at the University of Texas at Arlington in 2010, where he received the James S. Barnett Jr. Ideas in Art Charitable Foundation Scholarship. He graduated in 2012 from the Rhode Island School of Design with a Master in Fine Art, aided by the prestigious Presidential Scholar Tuition award.
In 2014, he received the The Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough from the Dallas Museum of Art in order to complete the WCD Project. In 2016, he received an Artist Microgrant from the Nasher Sculpture Center to start the production of his Chapel project. Chapel, completed in 2018 was acquired by the Dallas Museum of Art and exhibited in the exhibition For a Dreamer of Houses.
His work is currently included Soy de Tejas – A Statewide Survey of Latinx Art at the Centro de Artes in San Antonio.
Zeke Peña / Selected by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
Zeke Peña is a Xicano storyteller and cartoonist from El Paso, Texas. He makes comics and visual narratives that reclaim stories and remix history.
His work is a mash-up of political cartoon, border rasquache and Hip Hop culture that addresses universal themes of identity, politics, ecology and social justice.
He received a degree in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin and is self-taught in the studio.
He has received awards for his book illustrations and his work is in several American and Xicano art collections.
Meet the Curators
Theresa Bembnister / Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts
Theresa Bembnister joined the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in 2020 and co-created the podcast and video series Delta Voices: Artists of the Mid-South the following year. With a focus on contemporary art, Bembnister programs AMFA’s new media gallery and spaces dedicated to site-specific installations. As a curator, she believes in supporting artists’ visions and crafting museum experiences that are engaging, accessible, educational, and fun.
Previously, Bembnister served as curator of exhibitions at the Akron Art Museum in Ohio and associate curator at the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art at Kansas State University. She received her MA in art history and museum studies from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute.
She has written about art for two decades, publishing art criticism and journalism for broad audiences in Cleveland’s Scene, Kansas City’s The Pitch and The Kansas City Star, and Glasstire.com, among other media outlets.
Along with colleagues at the Akron Art Museum, she developed the Knight Foundation-funded chatbot tour guide Dot, which was profiled in the fall 2019 New York Times museums special report. That same year, Bembnister organized the NEA-supported exhibition Open World: Video Games & Contemporary Art, which traveled to the Currier Museum of Art in New Hampshire and Oklahoma Contemporary. The exhibition’s catalog, which she edited, is the first on the topic of video games and visual art published in the United States.
Kalyn Fay Barnoski / Philbrook Museum of Art
Kalyn Fay Barnoskia, a Cherokee Nation enrollee of Muscogee Creek descent, is an interdisciplinary artist, musician, curator, and educator from Oklahoma. Centering Indigenous and decolonial methodologies, their work focuses on self-location, community-building, collaboration, and empathy through the use of music, publication, storytelling, and contemporary craft. In every endeavor, they see their practice as a way to find the ways in which we all intersect and to build bridges of understanding between. Their practice is “for you, for me, for us, for we.”
Kalyn Fay Barnoski holds an M.F.A. from University of Arkansas (2021), an M.A. from The University of Tulsa (2016), and a B.F.A. from Rogers State University (2012). Barnoski has worked with Peabody Essex Museum, Philbrook Museum of Art, Gilcrease Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, The Momentary, Eiteljorg Museum, along with others, and performed, exhibited, and facilitated workshops both nationally and internationally.
Maggie Adler / Amon Carter Museum of American Art
Margaret (Maggie) Adler ’s scholarly research focuses on nineteenth-century art, but consistent with the Carter’s commitment to fostering cross-temporal connections, she often collaborates with living artists on site-specific installations, including Gabriel Dawe, Mark Dion, and Justin Favela.
Since joining the Carter in 2013, Adler has organized numerous exhibitions, including Wild Spaces, Open Seasons: Hunting and Fishing in American Art (2016); Horizon Lines (2017); In Our Own Words: Native Impressions (2018); The Perilous Texas Adventures of Mark Dion (2020); Mythmakers: The Art of Winslow Homer and Frederic Remington (2020); and Sandy Rodriguez In Isolation (2021).
Adler’s publication highlights include Homer|Remington (distributed by Yale University Press, 2020) and an essay contribution to Wild Spaces, Open Seasons: Hunting and Fishing in American Art (University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), which was nominated for the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award. Adler has also collaborated with artists Gabriel Dawe on Embodied Light (Amon Carter Museum of American Art, 2016) and Mark Dion on The Perilous Texas Adventures of Mark Dion (Yale University Press, 2020).
Adler holds a Bachelor of Arts in classical languages and the history of art and a Master of Arts in the history of art from Williams College.
Dr. Xuxa Rodríguez / Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
A critical race and intersectional feminist art historian, Dr. Xuxa Rodríguez, PhD (she/her/ella) is responsible for modern and contemporary American art spanning the areas of Latinx and Latin American art, African diasporic art, feminist and queer art, time-based media, and transnational artists. She joined Crystal Bridges in spring of 2020.
For fall of 2023, Dr. Rodríguez is curating Lee Mingwei’s Sonic Blossom at Crystal Bridges, the museum’s first exhibition dedicated to a participatory performance installation. Her exhibition projects include Loring Taoka ±, an artist installation for the museum’s contemporary artist project space, and Entre/Between, a multi-sited focus show dedicated to Latinx art and history in the permanent collection at Crystal Bridges with video and performances at the Momentary.
Her recent publications include “Listening to Ana Mendieta,” a peer-reviewed article of new research on the artist in the Archives of American Art Journal’s fall 2021 issue; “Refashioning the World: Whiteness, Racial Plagiarism, and Diversifying the Future” in the exhibition catalog for Fashioning America; and “Telling Truths, Expanding Histories” in Views of Crystal Bridges, the museum’s 2022 collections guide.
She has expanded both the Crystal Bridges’ and Art Bridges’ collections with works by Edouard Duval-Carrié, Alfred Conteh, Alfredo Jaar, Arthur Jafa, Patrick Martinez, Ana Mendieta, Shirin Neshat, Kenny Rivero, Shizu Saldamando, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles.
Dr. Rodríguez holds a PhD in art history from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
