Evan Garza

Evan Garza is a global contemporary art scholar, queer art historian, and curator at MASS MoCA. They earned their MA from the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art at the Clark Art Institute. Garza’s scholarship largely focuses on legacies of resistance, colonization, racial violence, queer art history, and the artistic legacies of the AIDS epidemic. Prior to their appointment as curator in September 2024, Garza was an inaugural Curatorial Exchange Initiative fellow at MASS MoCA, a pilot BIPOC curatorial fellowship, through which they curated the critically acclaimed exhibition Steve Locke: the fire next time.

Garza was the 2021–22 Fulbright US Scholar at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, where they performed collection research and simultaneously served as visiting research fellow in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Trinity College Dublin and studied Irish, artist-led protest movements and Dublin’s colonial architectural history. Garza’s previous roles include: director of Rice Public Art at Rice University in their native Houston, artistic director and co-curator of the 2021 Texas Biennial, assistant curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin, and exhibitions and programs director for the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (now SMFA at Tufts). In 2011, Garza cofounded Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR), a New York nonprofit and the first residency program in the world exclusively for LGBTQ+ artists. They have held visiting graduate faculty positions at Lesley University in Cambridge and Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA.

Garza’s writing on the work of contemporary artists has been published in several monographs. New and recent publications include Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me, the artist’s US Pavilion catalogue for the 60th Venice Biennale; At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World, edited by Hilton Als and published by David Zwirner Books; and Vincent Valdez: Just a Dream, co-published by CAMH and MASS MoCA. Garza is currently editing artist Steve Locke’s career monograph, I said what I said, to be released by DelMonico Books in early 2026.

photo by Gillian Heck