IN/SITU
IN/SITU at EXPO CHICAGO 2024. Claudia Peña Salinas, Chalchiuhtlicue Codex, 2024. Curated by Amara Antilla, Independent Curator and Guest Curator at Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) in Cincinnati. Courtesy of the artist and CURRO, Guadalajara. Photo by Justin Barbin.
Installed within the expansive, vaulted architecture of Navy Pier’s Festival Hall, IN/SITU features large-scale sculpture, installation, video and site-specific works. For the 2025 program, Jessica Hong, Chief Curator at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, will curate a selection of works featuring artists from leading international exhibitors participating in the exposition.
2025 IN/SITU Curator
Photo: Flanders Creative
Jessica S. Hong is a curator and cultural worker who has dedicated her practice to highlighting under-recognized narratives and stimulating generational change within institutional sites. Hong is the newly-appointed Chief Curator at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, MO. She is formerly the Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Toledo Museum of Art (TMA). At TMA, she organized the premiere of Stan Douglas’s major film installation Doppelgänger (2021) in a U.S. institution, Living Legacies: Art of the African American South (2022), Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg–Machine Auguries: Toledo (2023), and Toledo’s presentation of Marisol: A Retrospective (2024). Additionally, she launched TMA’s digital artist residency and, in 2022, she was awarded Toledo’s 20 Under 40, which recognizes leaders in the community.
Prior to the TMA, she was the Associate Curator of Global Contemporary Art at Dartmouth’s Hood Museum of Art and the first to fill this position on the occasion of the museum’s major expansion. Hong was Assistant Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston where she organized exhibitions including Arthur Jafa: Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death (2018) and the Boston presentation of We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85 (2018). Before the ICA, she was part of the new Division of Modern and Contemporary Art that launched the renovated Harvard Art Museums. Hong was previously based in New York and held curatorial positions at Independent Curators International (ICI), SculptureCenter, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Hong continues to serve as a national critic and juror for numerous fellowships, awards, prizes, and residency programs and was a member of the U.S. Pavilion curatorial advisory committee for the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. She received her M.A. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and B.A. from Barnard College, Columbia University.