Holly E. Hughes is Godin-Spaulding Senior Curator for the Collection at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Her curatorial practice involves organizing exhibitions from the museum’s collection and working with world-renowned artists such as Jason Middlebrook on acquisitions and site-specific installations.
She has organized the collection-based exhibitions Giant Steps: Artists and the 1960s, Drawing: The Beginning of Everything, Picasso: The Artist and His Models, Monet and the Impressionist Revolution, 1860–1910 and Arp, Miró, Calder, as well as a series of collection-based exhibitions that examine traditionally defined genres, including For the Love of Things: Still Life, Eye to Eye: Looking Beyond Likeness, and Menagerie: Animals on View. Currently, Hughes is working on a comprehensive reinstallation of the Buffalo AKG's collection for the museum's reopening in the first half of 2023.
Past projects with the Buffalo AKG include Spencer Tunick’s installation at Buffalo’s Central Terminal and the exhibitions Bodily Space: New Obsessions in Figurative Sculpture, Op Art Revisited: Selections from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Videosphere: A New Generation, Sweet Dreams, Baby! Life of Pop, London to Warhol, Kelly Richardson: Legion, and One Another: Spiderlike, I Spin Mirrors. She served as the museum’s project director for The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art, a monumental exhibition of contemporary Chinese art that marked the first collaboration between American art museums and a major Chinese art institution.
Hughes holds undergraduate degrees in Fine Art, with a concentration in photography, and Art History from Buffalo State College and a master’s degree with a major concentration in Contemporary Art and a minor concentration in Indigenous Art from the State University of New York at Buffalo.
Current role