Curator Ashley James Brings a Fresh Perspective to the Guggenheim

How do people want to be seen, if they even want to be seen at all? That’s the question at the center of “Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility,” the latest Guggenheim Museum exhibition curated by Dr. Ashley James. She arrived at the phrase “going dark” one night when scrolling on her phone, jotting exhibition title ideas in her Notes App. “We know if somebody says, ‘You went dark on me,’ they’re saying, ‘You didn’t reply to my text,’” she tells me on a recent afternoon at the Guggenheim’s Financial District offices. “It’s also resonant in terms of darkness as a concept. The darkness that is literally Blackness. I’m well aware of the cheekiness of ‘going dark’ and what it means for it to be a Black rotunda show in a museum that does not have a track record of having Black artists at all, let alone in the rotunda. It clicks.”

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