Adia Sykes

Adia Sykes is a Chicago-based curator pursuing a Masters of Arts degree (2018) in the Department of Arts Administration and Policy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). She is a Graduate Curatorial Assistant with Sullivan Galleries and a Graduate Curatorial Fellow with the Department of Exhibitions at SAIC. Most recently she was selected to be a Curatorial Resident for the ACRE Residency Program (Chicago). Adia has a BA in Anthropology from the University of Chicago (2016) with a focus on material culture and museums. Her current research interests include examining the history and potential of curatorial practice as an advocacy tool for racial equity in the arts and racial and gendered identities explored in the visual and performative practices of emerging artists. She currently writing her thesis on formations of self-organized networks of support that exist to sustain the practices of historically marginalized artist communities and plans to create a map of this contemporary ecosystem of support that will later exist as a resource for cultural producers in the city of Chicago.