Adrienne L. Childs

Art curator Adrienne L. Childs was born on March 2, 1960 in Los Angeles, California to Geraldine Barham Griffin Howell and Horace Griffin, Jr. She received her B.A. degree in art history in 1982 from Georgetown University, her M.B.A. degree in 1985 from Howard University, and her M.A. degree in 1999 and Ph.D. degree in 2005 in art history from the University of Maryland.

From 2005 to 2010, Childs was a curator at the David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland. She then joined the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University in 2013. In 2017, Childs co-curated The Black Figure in the European Imaginary at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida; and, in 2020, she served as guest curator of Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. Childs became a senior consulting curator there in 2021 and then adjunct curator. In 2022, she co-curated The Colour of Anxiety: Race, Sexuality and Disorder in Victorian Sculpture with Nicola Jennings at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, England. Childs has curated numerous other exhibits, including Successions: Prints by African American Artists from the Jean and Robert Steele Collection (2002), Arabesque: The Art of Stephanie E. Pogue (2008), Tradition Redefined: The Larry and Brenda Thompson Collection of African American Art (2009), Her Story: Margo Humphrey Lithographs and Works on Paper (2010), and Creative Spirit: The Arts of David C. Driskell (2011).

Childs co-edited the anthology Blacks and Blackness in European Art of the Long Nineteenth Century (2014) and was a contributor to The Image of the Black in Western Art (2014), edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and David Bindman. She also co-edited Riff: African American Artists and the European Canon, published in the spring 2018 issue of Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art and authored Ornamental Blackness: The Black Figure in European Decorative Arts.

Childs has been awarded fellowships with the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Colby College’s Lunder Institute for American Art, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and the Getty Foundation.

In 2022, Childs was awarded the David C. Driskell Prize by The High Museum of Art.

Childs resides in Washington, D.C. with her husband, Ron Childs. Together they have two children.

Adrienne L. Childs was interviewed by The HistoryMakers on August 18, 2022.