CLAREMONT, CA.- The Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College announced the appointment of Solomon Salim Moore as the museum’s new academic curator. Moore, who has been the assistant curator of collections at the Benton since 2020, assumes his new role at the start of Pomona College’s spring semester in January.

“Salim Moore is that rare person who has the gift of making everyone feel included, engaged, and enlightened,” said Victoria Sancho Lobis, Sarah Rempel and Herbert S. Rempel ’23 Director of the museum. “He’s an educator, an artist, a curator, a mentor, and an all-around wonderful person. These qualities and many more will equip him well to serve in the crucial role of liaison between our museum and its academic communities.”

As academic curator, Moore will be responsible for facilitating academic programs and more than 100 class visits each year from Pomona College and across the Claremont Colleges consortium, working closely with faculty members. He will also now direct the Benton’s robust intern program, which consists of approximately 35 paid students each academic year who are integral to the museum’s operations.

As the Benton’s assistant curator of collections, Moore managed access to Pomona College’s permanent collection of more than 20,000 objects and closely collaborated with members of the museum’s staff and Pomona faculty and students to develop and advance research projects and exhibitions related to the collection. He found new and creative ways to engage audiences with collection-based exhibitions, including organizing an astronomy night walk with Jorge Moreno, associate professor of physics and astronomy at Pomona, for the exhibition Night Contains Multitudes, and hosting Draw Jam 2024!, a daylong drawing festival—with games, live music, and workshops—that attracted more than 200 people to the Benton. As the director of the museum’s popular Salon Series, Moore brought students, faculty, and museum supporters into the vaults for private viewings and lively conversations organized around specific themes.

Moore was also the co-director of the Benton’s career development program, the AllPaper Seminar, which over the past three years has introduced graduate students and young professionals from all backgrounds to the field of works on paper. Funded by Getty and the Tavolozza Foundation, the AllPaper Seminar included intensive residencies in Claremont in which the fellows visited archives, special collections, personal collections, and studios thoughout the Los Angeles region, all organized by Moore with the goal of training a new generation of museum leaders in the history and processes of printmaking and drawing. The program led to two exhibitions at the Benton, curated by Moore and featuring the work of the AllPaper fellows: Infinity on Paper: Drawings from the Collections of the Benton Museum of Art and Jack Shear (2024) and Doubles: Prints and Drawings from the Collections of the Benton Museum of Art and Ian White (upcoming in February 2025). Moore also curated the exhibitions Known & Understood: Selections from the Permanent Collection (2022) and Night Contains Multitudes (2023).

Prior to his arrival in Claremont, Moore was a curatorial assistant in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he also served as a graduate fellow in the Department of Learning and Public Engagement. He also taught at Marwen, a Chicago organization dedicated to providing free art courses to middle and high school students from under-resourced communities and schools. He has been an artist-in-residence at Ox-Bow (2018) in Saugatuck, Michigan, and the Chicago Artists Coalition (2019–21). A Southern California native, Moore has also worked at the Pasadena Museum of History, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Side Street Projects, a mobile artist-run organization that supports youth and socially engaged art in Pasadena and Los Angeles County. He received a BA in art history from Reed College and an MFA from the Department of Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.