Blair Murphy is a curator based in the DC area and the Curator of Exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington in Arlington, VA. At MoCA Arlington, she shapes the vision for the exhibitions program and has curated numerous exhibitions, including An Adventure of Being, Take a Number: Artists and Bureaucracy, Stretched, Applied Forces, Transitional Objects, and Over, Under, Forward, Back. She launched the museum’s biennial exhibition series, Assembly, in 2019. Her previous curatorial projects include exhibitions at The Kitchen (New York, NY), Washington Project for the Arts (Washington, DC), Trestle Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Field Projects (New York, NY), VisArts Rockville (Rockville, MD), and with the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. She was a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow of the Whitney Independent Study Program and holds a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art and an MA from Georgetown University.
Join exhibition co-curators Blair Murphy and Jared Packard for a tour of Assembly 2024: Horizon Scanning, the third iteration of MoCA Arlington’s biennial exhibition series. Free and open to the public, the tour will feature the curators discussing the artwork in the exhibition and their curatorial process.
Launched in 2019, Assembly highlights current material and conceptual trends among contemporary artists. Since 2022, the exhibition has had a national focus, showcasing artists from across the United States who are working at the forefront of contemporary art.
In a time of multiple, overlapping, and seemingly perpetual crises, the 2024 iteration of MoCA Arlington’s national biennial brings together artists whose work can help us grapple with our tumultuous present by offering strategies to navigate and reimagine the future. The exhibition assembles thirteen artists and one artist collective hailing from 14 states who represent a range of art-making approaches including painting, drawing, film and video, sculpture, animation, and community organizing. While eclectic in their materials and processes, these artists are unified in creating work that contends with our unstable social and political climate.
About the Curators
Jared Packard’s practice straddles studio-based artmaking and curatorial work. As a curator, Packard emphasizes interdisciplinary practices and centers emerging and underrepresented artists with an emphasis on creative strategies that interrogate prevailing cultural narratives, established power hierarchies, and under-considered material histories. Packard is an artist and curator who has held positions at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE, Sullivan Galleries, Chicago, IL, and International Arts & Artists, Washington, DC. Packard completed his BA at Clark University and his MFA at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has curated Opulence: Performative Wealth and the Failed American Dream, Bemis Center, Omaha; the NEA-funded unLOCK: Merging Art and Industry, Lockport, IL; the nationally traveling exhibition, ReTooled: Highlights from the Hechinger Collection; and (Re)Flex Space, Sullivan Galleries, Chicago, IL. He has shown at the Salina Art Center, Salina KS; Project Project, Omaha, NE; ADDS DONNA, Chicago, IL; Sullivan Galleries, Chicago, IL; Centre International d’Art Contemporain, Pont-Aven, France; and Hillyer Art Space, Washington, DC.
