Lauren Haynes Named Head Curator of Governors Island

The Trust for Governors Island has appointed Lauren Haynes head curator and vice president of arts and culture for the New York Harbor island, a stone’s throw from the Statue of Liberty and downtown Manhattan. Haynes arrives to her new role from the Queens Museum, where she was director of curatorial affairs and programs. She will be responsible for overseeing and augmenting the island’s display of six permanent and long-term public artworks scattered across its 172 acres. As well, she will have charge of the Organizations in Residence program, which each year allows more than two dozen nonprofits from across New York City’s five boroughs to host public cultural programs in the island’s historic homes free of charge.

“We have big ambitions for the arts program here, which is to be New York’s pre-eminent public art destination,” Clare Newman, the president and chief executive of the trust, told theNew York Times.The island—which was in succession occupied by the Lenape, the US Army, and the coast guard before being repurposed as a recreational and cultural hub in 2005— is accessible via ferry from Manhattan and, in summer, Brooklyn. “Lauren is very good at bringing emerging voices and underrepresented artists to the forefront and shares our ideas about growing the public art program significantly.”

Born in Tennessee, Haynes studied art history at Oberlin College in Ohio before joining the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she occupied a succession of increasingly important roles over the course of a decade, championing Black art at a time when doing so was not yet common. Following her tenure there, Haynes decamped to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, where she helmed the contemporary art program for five years. In 2021, she joined the Nasher Museum of Art in Durham, North Carolina. In the year she spent there, she co-organized a major exhibition of the work of Lyle Ashton Harris, which will travel to the Queens Museum this spring. 

Speaking with the Times, Haynes reflected that “you didn’t have to prove to anyone that artists of color deserve to be in museums and have exhibitions, it was a given,” at the Studio Museum. “I want to continue that here,” she affirmed, “where I can have the most impact and where I can help tell those stories, to bring artists in and bring people from all five boroughs.”