VALERIE J. MERCER is the first curator of African American art and Head of the General Motors Center for African American Art at The Detroit Institute of Arts. She left New York on September 17, 2001 to assume her new position at the museum. Prior to her move to Detroit, she was an adjunct professor for two years at The City College of New York and visiting lecturer at The Rhode Island School of Design, teaching courses on modern and contemporary art.
Ms. Mercer developed her curatorial experience working at The Studio Museum in Harlem for seven years, leaving there in 1999 as senior curator. Among the numerous exhibitions she curated at The Studio Museum were the nationally toured Explorations in the City of Light: African-American Artists in Paris, 1945-1965 and The Studio Museum in Harlem: 25 Years of African-American Art; and a solo exhibition on the paintings and works on paper of renowned abstract artist William T. Williams. She wrote essays for the catalogs that accompanied these exhibitions and has written articles for The New York Times.
Over the years, Ms. Mercer has lectured on various art topics, such as “The Cult of the Stereotype at the Turn-of-the-Century”; “African-American Abstract Artists;” and “Modernist Primitivism: Responses of African-American Artists in Paris and New York, 1945-1965”. For The Detroit Institute of Arts, in 2002 she curated the exhibition Then and Now: A Selection of Nineteenth-and-Twentieth Century Art by African-American Artists, and in 2006 organized the exhibition African American Art from the Walter O. Evans Collection. Recently,as part of the DIA’s reinstallation project, she developed five permanent collection galleries for African American art which were unveiled in November, 2007.
Ms. Mercer received her undergraduate degree in art history from New York University, and her graduate degree in art history from Harvard University.