The Scholars Speak II

Join The Phillips Collection in partnership with Millennium Arts Salon for Scholars Speak II, a special 15th-anniversary program continuing the legacy of the original Scholars Speak, presented at the Phillips in 2008. Moderated by Adrienne L. Childs, this lively conversation brings together Camille Brown, Tuliza Fleming, Melanee Harvey-Fryar, Jordana Moore Saggese, and Dalila Scruggs to explore African American art and art history, and the ways artists, scholars, and curators shape our understanding of these histories today. IMAGE: Clockwise from top left: Camille Brown, Adrienne L. Childs, Tuliza Fleming, Dalila Scruggs, Jordana Moore Saggese, and Melanee Harvey-Fryar Camille Brown is an Associate Curator at The Phillips Collection in Washington DC. She curated the exhibition Essex Hemphill: Take care of your blessings (2025), and co-curated Where We Meet: Selections from the Howard University Gallery of Art and The Phillips Collection (2024), and Pour, Tear, Carve: Material Possibilities in the Collection (2023). Brown has coordinated exhibitions including Lou Stovall: The Museum Workshop (2022), and the DC presentation of African Modernism in America, 1947–67 (2023). Brown has worked in the curatorial departments of the Norton Simon Museum of Art in Pasadena, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She holds degrees from Loyola University in New Orleans and New York University. Dr. Adrienne L. Childs is an independent scholar, art historian, and curator. She is Senior Consulting Curator at The Phillips Collection. Her current book is an exploration of Black figures in European decorative arts entitled Ornamental Blackness: The Black Figure in European Decorative Arts, published by Yale University Press. She is currently curating Beauford Delaney: So Much Love and Beauty for The Phillips Collection and Jubilee: Celebrating 25 Years of the Driskell Center. She was recently co-curator of Out of Many: Reframing an American Art Collection and Vivian Browne: My Kind of Protest for The Phillips Collection. She was the guest curator of Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition at The Phillips Collection in Washington DC, 2020. In 2022 Childs won the Driskell Prize for achievement in African American art history. Dr. Tuliza Fleming is the Curator of American Art at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), Smithsonian Institution. She received her MA and PhD in American art history from the University of Maryland, College Park (1997 and 2007), and her BA from Spelman College (1994). During her tenure at the NMAAHC, she worked to build the museum’s foundational American art collection, supervised the creation of a collection-based multi-media interactive, co-curated the traveling exhibition, Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing: How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment, and served as the lead curator for the museum’s inaugural exhibition, Visual Art and the American Experience. Formerly, Dr. Fleming served in the position of Associate Curator of the American Art at The Dayton Art Institute in Dayton, Ohio. Since 1996, Dr. Fleming curated over 20 exhibitions and worked and/or consulted for a variety of museums and cultural institutions. Her publications include, “Visual Art and the American Experience: Creating an Art Gallery in a History and Culture Museum,” Art and Public History: Approaches, Opportunities, and Challenges (Rowan and Littlefield, 2017); “Cover Stories: The Fusion of Art and Literature During the Harlem Renaissance,” Dream a World Anew: The African American Experience and The Shaping of America (Smithsonian Books, 2016); “The Convergence of Aesthetics, Politics and Culture: Jeff Donaldson’s Wives of Shango,” AfriCOBRA: Philosophy (The University of Chicago, 2013); “It’s Showtime! The Birth of the Apollo Theater,” Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing: How the Apollo Theater Shaped American Entertainment (Smithsonian Books, 2010); “The ‘Museum Baby’ Grows Up: Being a Curator of Color in a Monochromatic Art Museum World,” Museum News (July/August 2005); and, Breaking Racial Barriers: African American Portraits in the Harmon Foundation Collection (Pomegranate Press, 1997). Dr. Melanee C. Harvey-Fryar is associate professor of art history in the Department of Art in the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts at Howard University. She earned a BA from Spelman College and pursued graduate study at Boston University where she received her MA and PhD in American Art and Architectural History. In addition to serving as coordinator for the art history area of study at Howard, she served as programming chair for the James A. Porter Colloquium on African American Art and Art of the African Diaspora at the university from 2016 to 2025. She has published on architectural iconography in African American art, Black Arts Movement artists, religious art of Black liberation theology and ecowomanist art p