African American Museum director seeks to expand history, her own journey on Long Island
Tiarra Inez-Brown, executive director and chief curator of the Huntington African American Museum, pictured here in 2022, after graduating from the NYU Institute of Fine Art.
Tiarra Inez-Brown has made it her life’s mission to showcase “works in context” and bring new depth to history’s often-overlooked stories, particularly those of the African diaspora.
“Can we expand what we think we know about history museums, about African American history?” she asked in a recent conversation with the Journal. “And why we feel there’s some sort of separation between African American history and American history, because they are the same.”
As executive director and chief curator of the Huntington African American Museum (HAfAM), Brown is actively promoting this work on Long Island.
While this role, naturally, requires extensive education and field experience, her journey as an art historian had humble beginnings.
At age 17, Brown worked as a coat check girl at The Frick Collection.
“That was my very first museum job, and it was a fantastic time,” she said. “I just wanted to be in and around museums as much as possible.”
The beginning of a lengthy resume, Brown would later work in customer service at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, as a curatorial intern at the Whitney Museum of American History and a curatorial research associate at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Eventually, her journey led to a conversation with HAfAM’s board chairman Barry Lites.
“He’s so passionate about the museum, about the stories,” she said. “It's hard not to be passionate with him.”
After meeting with the entire HAfAM board, Brown identified persisting gaps in the area’s cultural offerings, particularly in the wake of a 2024 U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) investigation that found discriminatory practices within the Town of Hempstead Housing Authority and documented their role in perpetuating racial segregation.
Just three years earlier, a New York State Senate report on fair housing and discrimination found that Long Island remained one of the most racially segregated metropolitan areas in the nation.
“So this institution, in this particular region, is so incredibly important,” Brown said.
She’s already dedicated much of her career to covering more broadly the disregarded stories of the African American community and “Black and brown people,” so the opportunity to create Huntington’s first museum dedicated to doing “exactly that” was not only fitting, but “once in a lifetime,” Brown said:
“It was really kismet, especially as a first-time executive director. There’s a bit of worrying about if you’re the right person for the job, and I had to take a lot of time evaluating where I’ve been.”
From artifact curation and archiving to museum retail, Brown has worked across nearly every facet of museum operations.
“What is so beautiful about history is that it’s a collection of individual stories – and that is so precious to me,” she said, noting how much of her graduate research focused on similar oral history archival work.
“So it’s been really incredible to be here at [HAfAM], where that oral history ‘arm’ is embedded into the institution.”
Herstory
As a “bookish” child growing up in Jersey City, Brown said she’s always wanted to be a historian.
“I was always intensely curious,” she reflected. “…But I don’t think I really understood that I wanted to be an art historian until (undergrad).”
It was then, during Brown’s freshman year at Rutgers University, that she fell in love with the study – although arguably, by accident.
While entering one of her very first college history classes, Intro to Modern Britain, she was struck by a large screen projection of J.M.W. Turner’s “Rain, Steam and Speed: The Great Western Railway” painting.
Despite her awe of the “evocative” artwork, Brown said, its portrayal as the classroom’s central focus garnered initial confusion.
“I could have sworn I was in the wrong room,” she said. “The syllabus was history forward; nowhere did it mention art.”
A new college student at the time, Brown fittingly turned to find the “correct” classroom before being stopped by Professor Seth Koven, who informed her she was, in fact, “in the right place” for Intro to Modern Britain.
Through that introductory course, she learned something that would drive her career passion to this day: “I learned that art is history’s most important artifact,” Brown said. From that moment on, she wanted to be an art historian; one that specifically showcases underrepresented “works in context.”
Understanding an artwork "in context" means looking at the environment that influenced its creation or how its meaning changes depending on where and when it is experienced.
“I started to look back at my life and what that meant,” Brown explained, adding that “her why” is rooted in her identity as a Black woman.
“I grew up not seeing people who looked like me in museums, not even in Jersey City,” she said – and not in the museum mecca that is New York City.
“The Brooklyn Museum wasn’t even as Black [and] equitable as it is now,” she said. “I wanted to be able to do that work.”
As her career took off, Brown quickly learned how few Black curators and leaders comprise the professional museum landscape. While she nods to several “incredible” African American museums and other cultural institutions nationwide, she said the “bigger, encyclopedic” museum sites are predominantly white.
These larger institutions often face a “natural challenge” of determining what aspects of history or culture they cover, Brown said, leading to the “categorical” exclusion or underwriting of Black and brown stories.
“Essentially, my life’s work [and] goal is to be able to create spaces that feel genuine, thoughtful and nuanced for Black and brown individuals,” Brown said. “And for anyone, really.”
Remembering her purpose
Brown made other influential connections throughout her many roles across NYC’s robust museum landscape, most notably with Xavier Salomon.
At just 34, Salomon served as chief curator of the Frick Collection – an achievement almost unheard of at the time, Brown said. While working at the Frick, Brown decided to “take a swing” at asking Salomon to meet with her.
“It was very audacious looking back,” given his status, she said. Fortunately, it paid off.
During their meeting, Brown asked Salomon an important question: How does someone become you?
His advice was simple: Learn from experience and see the world around you. “He said everything you learn about curating, you learn on the job,” Brown recalled.
Which, with Salomon’s encouragement, meant spending a semester at the prestigious University College London to “sit, learn and be part of the practice,” she said. Brown dedicated much of her time abroad to studying the ethics of collecting, or “what it means to collect culture and history.”
She returned home to “really discover who I was and the story that I wanted to tell,” steps Salomon recommended she take in order to become the best art historian she could be.
After graduating with her bachelor’s degree in history and art history, Brown faced a barrier many young professionals today may relate to: No one was hiring.
“It’s a well-known flaw of the field (that) a bachelor's degree just won’t get you very far, unfortunately,” she said.
Brown had already been working multiple jobs to fund her undergraduate expenses, one of those being luxury real estate.
“I'd been promoted a couple times, and before I knew it, I was the assistant property manager of this luxury building,” she said.
Brown admits she briefly lost sight of her goals within the art history field around this time. Then, the pandemic happened.
“It kind of woke me up… I think I was very comfortable (and) content working in real estate,” Brown said. “But I remembered that just wasn’t what my purpose was.”
She decided to take another “swing,” and applied to a single master’s program: New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts (IFA).
Once again, it paid off.
She described IFA as an incredible experience, receiving training and mentorship from some of the nation’s best curatorial experts, like the “incomparable” Lowery Stokes Sims.
Sims, who became the Met museum’s first Black chief curator in 1995, served as Brown’s masters thesis advisor, and remains a “friend and mentor” to this day.
Brown also began developing her ethos at the IFA: uplifting Black and brown voices from across the globe in an intentional, intersectional manner that goes beyond the Eurocentric and colonial versions of history many currently believe, she said.
“A lot of my career has focused on expanding what we think we know,” she said. “That separating of easy narratives from the sometimes difficult stories.”
While Brown theorizes that artists of the African diaspora are actively untangling those narratives, she nods to her work with Denise Murrell’s project, “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” as further evidence.
The widely acclaimed exhibit ran at the Met through July 2024, featuring 160 global works, including paintings, sculptures, photographs and film footage that explored how Black artists shaped Black representation in modern art during the Harlem Renaissance era.
“(Murrell) really reshaped what we thought about the Black body in our very well-known art canon,” Brown said. “I learned so much during my time at the Met, and I’m so grateful to (have seen what museums) like the Met can create in terms of equity.”
Brown carried this positive momentum over to her subsequent work in independent curating before bringing her expertise to HAfAM.
Using history to create a more equitable future
As HAfAM seeks to expand, Brown is focused on creating a space that makes people of color (POC) feel welcome and historically represented within the greater Huntington community; which, in turn, may promote economic opportunity and local diversity.
“Everyone has been incredibly lovely and supportive of this institution, but the HUD report proved one very scary fact,” she said, noting declines in African American resident populations in communities across Long Island. “So, how do you create a space that makes people feel welcome? How do you make someone want to stay?”
Brown said segregation typically happens through economic opportunity factors in “modern times,” and that “affluent areas tend to have less POC” in general.
HAfAM aims to serve as encouragement for minority community members while promoting new, cross-cultural shared learning opportunities. “It’s so important to be seen, heard and loved,” Brown said. “Because if you feel loved and cared for in a place, you will stay.”
To her, this is why museums like HAfAm are so important.
“There are impeccable cultural institutions across Long Island, it’s an incredibly rich cultural community,” Brown said. “There just are not as many resources dedicated to Black and brown stories, unfortunately.”
The HAfAM team will host a series of “community conversations” with the public as planning for its physical site in Huntington’s Fair Meadow Park develops – a move Governor Kathy Hochul approved in June.
Despite currently lacking a physical space, HAfAM is indeed open and actively hosting pop-up exhibits and programming across Long Island.
Come 2027, HAfAM will unveil a yearlong initiative commemorating the 200-year anniversary of New York State’s abolition of slavery, featuring 27 distinct community events.
“We have so much history to cover,” Brown said. “New York was one of the largest slaveholding (northern) colonies… It’s a huge moment, and I don’t know if many people know about it.”
Following the nationwide America 250 observance, she views next year’s HAfAM initiative as a “beautiful” way to “keep the party going.”
“It will be a great opportunity to drop in with the museum and learn,” Brown said.
For more information about HAfAM, visit https://www.hafam.org.
Don’t miss a story
Get the latest news delivered to your inbox.
