Tyler Blackwell

Tyler Blackwell (he/him) is a curator from Fort Worth, Texas, currently serving as Curator of Contemporary Art at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. His practice explores queer and historically underrepresented artistic positions, post-1960s abstract painting and sculpture, lens-based media, and interdisciplinary practices that engage questions of history, power, representation, and cultural memory.

Over the course of more than fifteen years, Blackwell has worked across university, experimental, and encyclopedic museums, helping shape exhibitions, publications, collections, and artist-centered initiatives focused on modern and contemporary art.

At the Speed Art Museum, he has led an expansion of the institution’s contemporary program through exhibitions, acquisitions, strategic partnerships, and collection growth. He originated and oversees Current Speed, a recurring exhibition series devoted to emerging and mid-career artists presenting new work in the region. Projects in the series have included exhibitions with Sky Hopinka (2022), Angel Otero and Leslie Martinez (2023), Kathia St. Hilaire (2024, co-organized with the Clark Art Institute), and Vian Sora (2025, co-organized with the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and Asia Society Texas). He recently organized the Speed’s major presentation of Abstract Expressionists: The Women and curated the companion exhibition Abstraction, Continued: Recent Paintings from the Speed Art Museum Collection.

Blackwell is the co-founder and supervisor of the Sam Gilliam Visiting Artist Program at the Speed Art Museum, a major initiative supported by the Sam Gilliam Foundation that brings nationally and internationally recognized artists into sustained dialogue with Louisville’s communities, histories, and cultural landscape. The program, which has included artists vanessa german, Eric N. Mack, Deana Lawson, and Brandon Ndife, is led by Diallo Simon-Ponte, the inaugural Sam Gilliam Assistant Curator of Artist Programs.

Previously, from 2018–2022, Blackwell served as the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Associate Curator at the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston. There, he organized or co-organized exhibitions with Monira Al Qadiri, Hugh Hayden, Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, Rodney McMillian, Rebecca Morris, Leslie Martinez, Jacolby Satterwhite, Maria A. Guzmán Capron, Jagdeep Raina, Jacqueline Nova, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Yoshua Okón, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya, among others. In 2021, he co-curated Carriers: The Body as a Site of Danger and Desire, a group exhibition featuring fifteen Houston-area artists addressing identity, public health, social inequality, and community formation.

Prior to joining the Blaffer, Blackwell held positions at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago and the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute of Chicago.

His writing has appeared in publications produced by the Speed Art Museum, the Blaffer Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smart Museum of Art, and the Centre for Fine Arts Brussels. He holds an MA in Art History & The Humanities from the University of Chicago.

In January 2026, Blackwell was named a “Curator to Watch” by The Observer alongside colleagues at institutions around the world.