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Executive director and CEO of MoAD, Monetta White<\/a>, shares O\u2019Arwisters\u2019 belief in the museum as a powerful force\u2014as well as his history with the museum. She\u2019s had her current position since 2019, but she has been involved since the beginning, throwing the opening party in 2005 pro bono. <\/p>\n \u201cFor me, it’s been like a real, true full circle, from patron to producer to gala chair to board member to executive director,\u201d White says, adding, perhaps unnecessarily: \u201cI\u2019m really invested in MoAD. It just gets into your blood, and you love it.\u201d<\/p>\n Those programs O\u2019Arwisters mentioned\u2014the Emerging Artist Program, where the artists get a solo show and an honorarium (O\u2019Arwisters participated in 2023), shifting MoAD\u2019s focus from history to contemporary art, and the Chef-in-Residence Program, which began with Bryant Terry<\/a> in 2015 and continues ten years later with Jocelyn Jackson<\/a>\u2014are a big part of what make the museum stand out.<\/p>\n In a video in the Continuum exhibition, Terry talks about how food is not just sustenance but memory, archive, and resistance. We also hear from former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown, \u201cpolymath\u201d George McCalman, and journalist and founding MoAD board chair Belva Davis. There\u2019s a snippet of Barry Jenkins\u2019 2008 film Medicine for Melancholy<\/a>, where two people who don\u2019t know each other well go on an extended date that includes a visit to the museum, and commentary from filmmaker and scholar Dr. Artel Great<\/a> about how the movie was his introduction to the museum.<\/p>\n Great\u2019s now MoAD\u2019s cultural critic-in-residence<\/a>, a program White began along with the wildly successful Nexus, or Black Art Week<\/a>, held the first week of October, and the organization\u2019s biggest fundraiser, the Afropolitan Ball. Continuum collects all the archival information and history in one place, White says.<\/p>\n \u201cI really feel like now we have something that we can hand over to anybody that says, \u2018Here’s our history, here’s how we got here. This is what we’ve done\u2014and look at the museum now.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Key Jo Lee<\/a>, chief of curatorial affairs and public programs, who curated Continuum with Paul Plale, says they couldn\u2019t let the 20th anniversary go by unmarked. The exhibition gives them the opportunity to show the array of programs they have, as well as the caliber of the local and global artists that they show. <\/p>\n Like White, she says it\u2019s important to capture the museum\u2019s history while also looking to the future. <\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s important to me is solidifying MoAD through the archives. MoAD anchors itself in the archive through the materials that we capture in our exhibitions and after our exhibitions,\u201d she says. \u201cTo me, Continuum is giving a gesture toward the future while also showing the afterlives of all of these efforts and how they are culminating in this new global push.\u201d<\/p>\n In keeping with that forward-looking gaze, the museum has a new mission statement that explains its goal of placing \u201ccontemporary art and artists of the African Diaspora at the center of the global cultural conversation.\u201d<\/p>\n The \u201cglobal\u201d is important. <\/p>\n \u201cIf I’m in Paris, people say, \u2018Oh, we need a MoAD in Paris.\u2019 If I’m in London, they say, \u2018We need a MoAD in London.\u2019 I was in Dakar, and they’re like, \u2018We need a MoAD in Dakar,'” White continues. \u201cIt\u2019s really attesting to the gravity of the work that we endeavor to do. Well, it’s not that we’re trying to do it. It is what we’re doing.\u201d<\/p>\n This refusal to back down at a fraught time and commitment to supporting artists is refreshing for artist Cheryl Derricotte<\/a>. Like O\u2019Arwisters, she has a piece in the show, Tools of Resistance, 2025.<\/p>\n Derricotte was in the Emerging Artist Program in 2015 during the museum\u2019s 10-year anniversary, during which she made 12 glass pieces, 12 works on paper, and a video. This was just a few months after earning her MFA, and she says it was a wonderful launch to her artistic career.<\/p>\n \u201cFor me, what makes MoAD special is that the acknowledgement of my existence as a creative person,\u201d O\u2019Arwisters agrees. \u201cIt acknowledges the fact that my creativity and my artistic vision have a place in a world where it has always been, for the most part, denied.\u201d<\/p>\n \/\/ Continuum is on view at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) through March 1st, 2026; 685 Mission St. (SoMa), moadsf.org<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Two](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/two-women-smiling-in-front-of-a-colorful-nexus-art-event-poster.jpg\")
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