Kimberly Drew is leaving Tempo Gallery to return to the classroom, buying and selling the gross sales ground for a seminar room. The curator, author, and cultural drive will relocate to London this fall to start a masters program within the Historical past of Design on the Royal Faculty of Artwork. A spokesperson for Tempo confirmed that Drew will proceed to collaborate with the gallery on a undertaking foundation.
Drew introduced her exit on Instagram Friday, first with a narrative captioned “at this time is my final day at Tempo Gallery.” Two slides later was a picture of Drew, apparently carting her belongings out of the gallery, together with a brown pair of Loewe balloon pumps, a couple of pairs of sneakers, some packing containers, and some of the artwork world’s most constant accent, the tote bag. That slide was captioned, “for these questioning – I stop! grad faculty subsequent. grateful to marc and Tempo gallery for the chance to develop and now it’s time to go.”
Drew joined Tempo in 2022 as an affiliate director after making her title by a sequence of boundary-blurring roles that straddled museums, media, activism, and digital tradition. She was promoted to curatorial director in January 2023.
Recognized for launching the Tumblr Black Modern Artwork and co-editing the influential anthology Black Futures, Drew has additionally labored as social media supervisor for the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and extra lately as a curator for the NFT platform Voice.
Her arrival at Tempo was seen as a notable second for the blue-chip gallery, which was within the midst of a generational refresh underneath CEO Marc Glimcher. Amy Baumann and Renée Brown had been employed at across the similar time. In a press release on the time, Glimcher praised Drew’s “distinctive observe report as a artistic thinker” and her function in amplifying the voices of Black artists and creators.
