LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced that Adrienne Adams and Danielle Galván Gomez have been selected as the inaugural LACMA Emerging Art Professionals (LEAP) Fellows. The LEAP fellowship aims to enrich the diversity of the museum field by exposing recent college graduates with baccalaureate degrees from historically underrepresented groups to a variety of leadership experiences at LACMA. This opportunity is made possible, in part, through the Diversifying Art Museum Leadership Initiative, funded by the Walton Family Foundation and the Ford Foundation. Announced last November, the initiative supports creative solutions to diversify curatorial and management staff at art museums across the United States.

As a LEAP fellow, Adrienne Adams will assist Michael Govan, CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director, on executive-level activities related to the running of the museum. Additionally, Adams will gain exposure to curatorial practice in contemporary art acquisitions and displays, along with public programming in the education department, and learn best practices in art handling and database administration with the collections management, registration, collection information and digital assets, and art preparation departments. Danielle Galván Gomez will be mentored by Zoe Kahr, deputy director for curatorial and planning, and assist her exhibition programs team on a variety of projects related to the planning, design, and implementation processes for exhibitions and installations. Moreover, Galván Gomez will conduct curatorial research for upcoming exhibitions, collaborate on content development, provide support for public programs, and gain experience in audiencefocused approaches in the education department.

“LACMA has an ongoing and vested interest in diversifying the museum field and we look forward to focusing on this institutional goal within the context of museum leadership,” said LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director Michael Govan. “Through the LEAP fellowship, we hope to bring in the next generation of museum leaders that includes voices and opinions of those from a variety of backgrounds.”

Adrienne Adams is an archivist, educator, and scholar who graduated with honors from Occidental College’s Critical Theory and Social Justice Department. A Phi Beta Kappa inductee and Point Scholar, Adams worked as a teaching assistant for Rafa Esparza’s performance survey course on labor, sexuality, and race as well as a course on archiving Queer Los Angeles. While working at the Occidental Office of Community Engagement, Adams raised $20,000 to curate queer of color performance events. Upon graduating in 2017, they facilitated a dance fellowship for Black LGBTQ performers in the House and Ballroom community and engaged in an artist residency at the Whitney Museum of American Art, as part of painter Laura Owens’s midcareer retrospective. In 2019, American Quarterly will publish The Grit and Glamour of Queer Los Angeles, a digital archival book on which Adams served as an essay contributor and research assistant. Adams is looking forward to assisting with the exhibition Life Works: Charles White and His Students and better understanding how administrative processes shape museums’ conceptualization and enactment of arts equity.

Danielle Galvan Gomez is an artist, writer, Xicana, scholar-activist, and aspiring curator. Galván Gomez graduated with a BA in comparative literature from Brown University, where she was a fellow at both the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and received several grants to fund projects such as a border police violence historical database, summer internships with Los Angeles studio artists, and a foreign reporting trip to Cuba to interview dissident artists. Simultaneously, she studied painting and visual culture at the Rhode Island School of Design. A former Ryman Arts student, California State Summer School for the Arts (CSSSA) graduate, MOCA Apprentice, and Getty Multicultural Undergraduate Intern, Galván Gomez has worked and developed her praxis in spaces across L.A., most recently at the Los Angeles City Department of Cultural Affairs and The William Grant Still Arts Center in West Adams. She believes that a conscious art and curatorial practice should serve as an intermediary force between recorded and alternative histories, the communities that these spaces inhabit, and the futurism of a contemporary artist’s vision. Galván Gomez is a lifelong Angelena, and was a LACMA NexGen member as a child.