Exploring and exposing art’s relationship to power.

get to know me and my work

Lucia Olubunmi Momoh is a curator, writer, and scholar who works as the Constance E. Clayton Curatorial Fellow at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and was previously a curatorial associate for Prospect.5 *Yesterday we said tomorrow* in New Orleans. Momoh grew up in Sacramento as the oldest daughter of an interracial and multi-national (Nigerian-Sicilian-American) household. She completed her bachelors' in art history and French at the University of Oregon in 2012 and spent 2012-2016 working for the Washington Council for Behavioral Health, a community behavioral health advocacy organization in Seattle. She obtained her master's in art history at Tulane University in 2019. Her thesis, *The Art of Erasure*, examines an 1837 portrait of a free woman of color from New Orleans in the Historic New Orleans Collection that a professional restorer purposefully altered in 1988 to obscure markers of wealth from the Black sitter's image. Momoh addresses the damage and brings it into conversation with issues of systemic racism, the destruction of cultural property, and the role museums play in the formation of national and regional identities. Given her specialty in Black American history and museum studies and her history in advocacy, Momoh sees her curatorial career as a form of social activism rooted in decolonial practices.