Four leading curators bring new perspectives to this year’s MFA Thesis Exhibition during a full-day critique at The Andy Warhol Museum.
Each year, the School of Art invites a select group of curators, writers, and art world leaders to lend their critical insight to the MFA Thesis Exhibition. For Time-Honored Non-Specifics, we are honored to welcome Patricia Eunji Kim, Helen Starr, Lumi Tan, and Alyssa Velazquez as this year’s Distinguished Critics. On March 31, they’ll join the full faculty for an in-depth, all-day critique at The Andy Warhol Museum — offering new perspectives on the work of our graduating MFA candidates.
Patricia Eunji Kim, PhD
Art Historian and Curator, New York University
Patricia Eunji Kim is Assistant Professor at New York University. Dr. Kim’s research, teaching, and curatorial projects use art historical methods to explore questions of gender, race, power, and memory in antiquity and in the present. Her monograph, The Art of Queenship in the Hellenistic World (Cambridge University Press, 2025), is the first book-length study on the visual and material culture of Hellenistic queenship from the fourth to second centuries B.C.E. — a corpus of materials central to a show that she is guest-curating at the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Getty Villa. Dr. Kim has produced several exhibitions, articles, and interdisciplinary books on ancient and contemporary monument cultures, ecological temporalities, and contemporary receptions of antiquity.
Helen Starr
Independent Curator
Helen Starr is an Afro-Indigenous independent curator from Trinidad & Tobago whose world-building practice examines cosmo-poetics: how cultures instantiate bespoke worlds through interactive and immersive technologies. Her work is articulated through Carib Cosmotechnic, a framework that binds technology, ritual, and relational ontology within Caribbean epistemic traditions. She founded The Mechatronic Library in 2010 as an independent commissioning platform exploring Indigenous thresholds and non-humanist modes of world-making. In order to examine how Western epistemologies ossify through social, emotional, and religious proscriptions. Starr’s commissions ask how other epistemologies decentre Humanism and cultivate plural modes of being. Her commissioned artists include Rebecca Allen, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Kinnari Saraiya, Sarah Al-Sarraj, Aliyah Hussain, and Jack Ky Tan. Starr has worked internationally with Serpentine London, FACT Liverpool, transmediale Berlin, and Ars Electronica, serving three times as a jury member. In 2026, she co-founded an experimental agency and showspace in Central London.
Lumi Tan
Independent Curator
Lumi Tan is an independent curator and writer based in New York City, specializing in interdisciplinary exhibitions and performances. Recent and upcoming projects include those at DOOSAN Gallery, Seoul; Performance Space New York; and the 2026 Converge45 city-wide exhibition in Portland, Oregon. She has been the curator of the Focus section at Frieze New York since 2024, and from 2022–2024, she was the Curatorial Director of Luna Luna, a revival of the world’s first art amusement park created by André Heller in 1987. Previously, Tan was Senior Curator at The Kitchen, New York, where over a twelve-year tenure, she organized exhibitions and produced performances with artists including Kevin Beasley, Meriem Bennani, Gretchen Bender, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Autumn Knight, Moor Mother, Sondra Perry, The Racial Imaginary Institute, Tina Satter, Kenneth Tam, Danh Vo, and Anicka Yi. Tan has also held positions at the Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain Nord Pas-de-Calais, France; Zach Feuer Gallery, New York; and MoMA/P.S.1, New York. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Artforum, Frieze, Mousse, Cura, Art in America, and numerous exhibition catalogues and artist monographs. She was the recipient of 2020 VIA Art Fund Curatorial Fellowship, and has been faculty at the Columbia University School of the Arts, School of Visual Arts, Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and Yale School of Art.
Alyssa Velazquez
Curator, Carnegie Museum of Art
Alyssa Velazquez is an assistant curator at Carnegie Museum of Art. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in filling Station, S/He Speaks 2: Voices of Women, Trans & Nonbinary Folx, Burnaway, and AutoStraddle. Residences include Storyknife and as a Freshworks Artist at Kelly Strayhorn Theater. Velazquez was selected as a 2026 Center for Craft Curatorial Fellow, a 2024 Lambda Literary fellow, and was invited to join PlayPenn’s 2024-25 Playwrights Cohort.
Time-Honored Non-Specifics is on view at The Andy Warhol Museum from March 27 to April 12, 2026.