Community Partnership Staff & Board

Max Anderson has devoted his career to advancing the mission of non-profit cultural institutions while creating best practices to ensure their development and sustainability. He has long sought to address challenges facing the cultural sector, from community engagement to programmatic relevance, transparent business practices, cultural property ownership disputes, operational efficiency, and the impact of digital platforms on communications. Served as a museum director for almost thirty years in Atlanta, Toronto, New York City, Indianapolis, and Dallas.

Sanford Biggers’ work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art among others. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and the Rome Prize in Visual Arts. He is the 2021-2022 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Professor and Scholar in the MIT Department of Architecture.

Diedrick Brackens is best known for his woven tapestries that explore allegory and narrative through the artist’s autobiography, broader themes of African American and queer identity, as well as American history. Brackens employs techniques from West African weaving, quilting from the American South and European tapestry-making to create both abstract and figurative works.

Kinshasha Holman Conwill has nearly 40 years of arts industry experience and most recently served as deputy director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, D.C., from 2006 to 2022. She now holds the title of deputy director emerita at the Museum.

B. E. Noel is President of Noel Art Liaison, Inc. NYC/CLT, a fine art advisory service, a role she has held for over 25 years. Prior to this position, she worked as director of her eponymous Noel Gallery founded in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1997 and dedicated to advocating for Black artists in the region.

Valerie Cassel Oliver is the Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. She has served as the Senior Curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the Director of the Visiting Artists Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a Program Specialist for the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2011, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta presented Cassel Oliver with the David C. Driskell Prize, named for the renowned African-American artist and art scholar.

Born and raised in Gee’s Bend (Boykin), Alabama, Mary Margaret Pettway is a fourth-generation quilter, and daughter of Lucy T. Pettway. She is a member of the Gee’s Bend Quilters Collective, founded in 2003 to promote and market quilts from the community of Gee’s Bend. She has taught quilting workshops throughout the southeast, and is a regular instructor at Black Belt Treasures Cultural Arts Center in Camden, Alabama. In 2018 she was named an Alabama Humanities Fellow by the Alabama Humanities Foundation.

Amy Sherald documents contemporary African American experience in the United States through arresting, otherworldly figurative paintings. Sherald was the first woman and first African American to ever receive the grand prize in the 2016 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition from the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C.; she also received the 2017 Anonymous Was A Woman award and the 2019 Smithsonian Ingenuity Award. In 2018, Sherald was selected by first lady Michelle Obama to paint her portrait as an official commission for the National Portrait Gallery. 

Lola C. West​ is a co-founder with Ian Fuller of WestFuller Advisors, a boutique wealth management firm in New York City. She served the board of directors of Jazz at Lincoln Center for 6 years, and presently serves on the boards of The New York Women's Foundation, the Donors of Color Network, True North Media, Inc. and The Three R's. She is also member of the nominating committee for the Four Freedoms Award by Roosevelt Institute.