In this lecture, Dwandalyn R. Reece, Curator of Music and Performing Arts at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, uses autoethnography to reflect upon her thirty-five years’ worth of experience in the public sector as a curator and scholar of music. She writes: “It is a story that places my life and career against the social, political, and cultural backdrop of the ensuing decades after the civil rights movement, when the revolutions of the sixties set the stage for navigating what living in an integrated society that supports the equal rights of all citizens really meant.”
Dwandalyn R. Reece is Curator of Music and Performing Arts at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and curated the museum’s permanent exhibition, Musical Crossroads, for which she received the Secretary’s Research Prize in 2017. Reece has collaborated with other SI units on such programs as the 2016 NMAAHC Grand Opening Festival, Freedom Sounds: A Community Celebration, and the 2011 Folklife Festival program, Rhythm &Blues: Tell it Like It Is. She is chair of the SI pan-institutional group, Smithsonian Music, and is currently working on the NMAAHC and Smithsonian Folkways collaboration, The Smithsonian Anthology of Hip-Hop and Rap, and serving as co-curator of the Smithsonian Year of Music.
