Nov

How can museums honor both the extraordinary and the everyday?

Museums are full of artifacts left by “the first and the famous,” says NMAAHC curator Ariana Curtis. Museums can better represent diverse stories, she argues, if they also include stories of everyday life.

Listen to the TED talk

About Ariana Curtis

Ariana A. Curtis is the first curator for Latinx Studies at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. As a curator, she researches, collects, exhibits and promotes Latinx- and Black-centered narratives to more accurately represent the history and culture of the Americas.

From 2020 to 2022, she was also the Director of Content for the Smithsonian’s ‘Our Shared Future: Reckoning with Our Racial Past’ initiative. Curtis is also a member of multiple committees for the Smithsonian’s American Women History Initiative.

Curtis earned her bachelor’s from Duke University and her doctorate in anthropology from American University. She is a Fulbright scholar.

Why you should listen

An African American educator and a Black Panamanian engineering research technician raised Dr. Ariana Curtis, the youngest of their four kids, in an Afro-Latinx affirming household. Government forms and ill-informed publics have wanted her to be either African American or Latina, but Curtis has always advocated for full and accurate representation of self above all.

The yearning to see lives represented whole led Curtis to travel and study the complex overlap of Blackness, identity, gender, diaspora and belonging. After earning a doctorate in anthropology, Curtis, a Fulbright scholar, joined the curatorial staff of the Smithsonian Institution. She currently serves as the first curator for Latinx Studies at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. In this role, she researches, collects, exhibits and promotes Latinx- and Black-centered narratives to more accurately represent the history and culture of the Americas. She also serves on multiple committees for the Smithsonian’s American Women History Initiative. She’s the author of the paper “Afro-Latinidad in the Smithsonian’s African American Museum Spaces” and the chapter “Identity as Profession: on Becoming an African American Panamanian Afro-Latina Anthropologist Curator” in Pan African Spaces: Essays on Black Transnationalism. She is passionate about Afro-Latinidad, her Omega Phi Beta sisterhood, social justice, radical love, the Duke Blue Devils and hoop earrings.

This is Part 2 of the TED Radio Hour episode Leaving a Mark. Check out Part 1, Part 3 and Part 4. This segment of the TED Radio Hour was produced by Rachel Faulkner White and edited by Sanaz Meshkinpour.