PHOENIX (July 2, 2025) – Phoenix Art Museum (PhxArt) announces the appointment of two new curators: Colin Pearson as the institution’s Curator for Asian Art and Dr. JoAnna Reyes as its new Adjunct Curator for Art of the Americas. Reyes’ role is a collaborative appointment between Phoenix Art Museum and the School of Art in Arizona State University’s (ASU) Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts. In their respective roles, Pearson will develop exhibitions that draw from and highlight the Museum’s expansive Asian art collection, and Reyes will curate exhibitions across the Museum’s American, Western American, Latin American, and Spanish Colonial art collections. Both Pearson and Reyes assume their roles effective immediately. 

“We are thrilled to welcome Colin Pearson and JoAnna Reyes to the outstanding curatorial team at Phoenix Art Museum,” said Jeremy Mikolajczak, the Museum’s Sybil Harrington Director and CEO. “Both Colin and JoAnna have deep expertise and significant experience within their respective fields and bring fresh, innovative perspectives to the presentation of the PhxArt Collection’s rich holdings. We are excited to see how their exhibitions engage and educate our audiences in new ways, reaffirming the Museum’s role as a space of belonging that reflects the breadth of experiences represented across our community.”

“I am both excited and humbled to be appointed as Phoenix Art Museum’s third curator of Asian art, and I look forward to sharing this incredibly rich collection with audiences in a variety of new ways,” said Pearson. “I feel passionately that the physical distance between Arizona and the places where these wonderful artworks originate does not need to be a barrier to the appreciation of their beauty. By approaching the collection with an open mind, I seek to help audiences discover what makes the artistic traditions of Asia distinct, highlight the intercultural exchanges that have always connected us, and make Asian art accessible and relevant for the diverse and family-oriented audiences here in the Valley of the Sun.”

“I am excited to join the curatorial team at Phoenix Art Museum and explore the Museum’s incredible collection of art from across the Americas,” said Reyes. “By taking a hemispheric approach, I hope to create exhibitions that highlight the migrations, exchanges, and shared stories that have shaped the region, with the goal of sparking new conversations and understanding of the art of the Americas.”

About Colin Pearson

Colin Pearson assumes his new role as PhxArt’s Curator of Asian Art, bringing over a decade of experience curating collections of Asian artworks, ceramics, craft items, musical instruments, and ethnographic artifacts, with expertise on the effects of maritime and Silk Road trade routes on the arts of Tibet, China, and India. He previously served as the Museum’s adjunct curator of Asian art since 2024, overseeing the refresh of the Art of Asia galleries and curating exhibitions such as Chardi Kala: Rising Above Adversity, a presentation of Sikh artworks exploring the concept of unwavering optimism in the face of hardship. This year, Pearson will serve as coordinating curator for the Museum’s presentation of Radical Clay: Contemporary Women Artists from Japan, organized by the Art Institute of Chicago, and lead curator for the exhibition Flowers of the Punjab: Textiles of India and Beyond, both opening in September 2025.

In addition to his work at PhxArt, Pearson has collaborated on curatorial projects at Arizona State University (ASU) and catalogued a collection of nearly 200 textiles, artworks, and ethnographic objects for ASU’s Center for Asian Research. From 2020 to 2022, Pearson served as a curator for the Zayed National Museum in the United Arab Emirates, cultivating and sharing his extensive knowledge of ceramics and other export goods traded along overland and maritime routes from China, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, and India. As a curator at the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix from 2009 to 2020, Pearson organized special exhibitions of custom-inlaid guitars and Chinese antiquities. He also expanded the institution’s collection of instruments and artifacts from Asia, Oceania, and the Middle East, as well as instruments from Europe and North America. 

Pearson has delivered public talks and lectures on a wide range of topics relating to Asian art, including the musical and artistic cultures of Asia, connoisseurship and classification schemes, and the global legacies of cultural interactions throughout history. He earned his Bachelor of Music at California State University, Long Beach and his Master of Arts in Ethnomusicology from the University of California at Riverside. He is currently working toward his PhD in Asian Art History at Arizona State University.

About Dr. JoAnna Reyes

Dr. JoAnna Reyes’s collaborative appointment as the Adjunct Curator for Art of the Americas at Phoenix Art Museum and Assistant Professor of Art History and Museum Studies at Arizona State University (ASU) further deepens the collaboration between the leading art museum in the Southwest and one of the largest comprehensive arts programs at a public research university in the U.S. In her new role at PhxArt, Reyes will curate exhibitions across the Museum’s American, Western American, Latin American, and Spanish Colonial art collections, expanding opportunities for audiences to consider connections across borders, time periods, and cultures.

Reyes’ first curatorial project at the Museum will be a collection installation in the institution’s newly renovated Art of the Americas and Europe galleries, which are re-opening in November 2025. Drawing from the Museum’s Spanish Colonial and Latin American art collections, Reyes will highlight the traditions and innovations in the viceregal art of Latin America, and how artists of the period drew inspiration from Asian art objects and prints from Northern Europe to create innovative, sophisticated, and nuanced works imbued with traditional Indigenous techniques, Catholic devotional imagery, and new iconographies invented to honor local saints and miracles. The installation will also showcase contemporary works that exemplify how Latin American artists today reference this period in their practices. 

In addition to her curatorial work, this fall Reyes will teach an ASU art history seminar, located in the Museum’s Education building. Reyes will use the PhxArt collection and new North Wing collection galleries to focus on a period between the 15^th and 16^thcenturies often referred to as the Age of Discovery, when Europeans developed a growing fascination with collecting a wide array of antiquities, natural specimens, books, prints, drawings, paintings, and other projects, largely influenced by the exploration and colonization of the Americas. Students will examine the practices and theoretical frameworks that informed early modern collecting and how they evolved into contemporary museological contexts, particularly around topics of repatriation, restitution, and deaccessioning.

A specialist in the visual and material culture of viceregal Latin American and contemporary Chicana/o America, Reyes explores identity, art patronage, and how images and symbols, particularly from border regions, shape our understanding of place and culture. She developed the 2025 exhibition Agua es Vida at the Rio Salado Audubon Center and Samouraï: Armure du Guerrier (2011) at the musée du Quai Branly with the Barbier-Mueller Museum (Dallas), published an entry in Archive of the World: Art and Imagination in Spanish America, 1500-1800 (Delmonico, 2022), and co-authored an article in Feminist Formations (John Hopkins University Press, 2022), among other ongoing writing and book projects. 

Reyes, who earned her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles, worked at the Getty Research Institute and served as the curatorial assistant at LACMA (2013-2015) and Mellon Fellow (2016-2017). Previously, she worked at the Hispanic Society Museum and Library (NY) and the Barbier-Mueller Museum, and from 2016-2019, she served as the book review editor for Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies. 

About Phoenix Art Museum

Since 1959, Phoenix Art Museum (PhxArt) has engaged millions of visitors with the art and fashion of our region and world. Located in Phoenix’s Central Corridor, PhxArt creates spaces of exchange and belonging for all audiences through dynamic exhibitions, collections, and art experiences. Each year, more than 250,000 guests engage with critically acclaimed national and international exhibitions, as well as the Museum’s collection of more than 21,000 works of American and Western American, Asian, European, Latin American, modern, and contemporary art and fashion. The Museum also presents vibrant photography exhibitions made possible through the Museum’s landmark partnership with the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson and is home to The Gene and Cathy Lemon Art Research Library, The Thorne Miniature Rooms, The Ullman Center for the Art of Philip C. Curtis, and Arizona Costume Institute (ACI). For the community, PhxArt hosts lectures, live performances, outstanding examples of global cinema, arts-education workshops, family-focused programs, and more. To learn more about Phoenix Art Museum, visit phxart.org, or call 602.257.1880. 

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PHOENIX (February 14, 2020) – A new exhibition at Phoenix Art Museum will present for the first time more than 40 recently acquired works of contemporary Latin American art to explore how the visual language of abstraction has generated profound insights into Latin American culture and politics and how Latin American artists have drawn on abstraction’s history within the region as well as the United States and Europe. Stories of Abstraction: Contemporary Latin American Art celebrates the contemporary artworks gifted to the Museum in 2018 by Nicholas Pardon, co-founder of the former SPACE collection—the largest collection of post-1990s abstract Latin American art in the United States. Featuring work by 25 artists from eight countries, the exhibition opens a window onto this important genre of contemporary art and explores how abstraction is used to visualize the social philosophies of the present. Stories of Abstraction will be on view at Phoenix Art Museum from May 2 through September 20, 2020. 

“Stories of Abstraction seeks to uncover the ways in which Latin American artists have used abstraction as both a vehicle to explore key issues relating to society and a tool to recast sometimes radical civic discourse,” said Gilbert Vicario, the Museum’s Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs and the Selig Family Chief Curator who curated the exhibition. “The title of the exhibition intends to make clear that there are complex narratives within these abstract works. The exhibition also furthers the Museum’s dedication to preserving and presenting significant works by Latin American artists, as well as its commitment to developing original scholarship that examines the meaning and underpinnings of abstract Latin American art. As our Phoenix community is more than 40% Latinx, Stories of Abstraction offers a timely examination of the visual language of Latin American abstraction, one that we believe our visitors can relate to and find inspiring and exciting.”

The recent acquisition of 112 works of art from Pardon, including paintings, sculptures, installations, and works on paper, represents a nearly 300% increase in the Museum’s holdings of contemporary Latin American art. Featuring artwork from the most innovative artists working in Latin America in recent years and today, including seven women artists, Stories of Abstraction makes accessible a wide range of compelling artwork from Venezuela, Mexico, Peru, Argentina, Colombia, Brazil, Honduras, and Guatemala. Stories of Abstraction will historically contextualize the exhibition’s contemporary works by placing them alongside key artworks from earlier decades to clarify Latin American abstraction’s relationship to other abstract movements. Historical works by Alexander Calder, Pedro Friedeberg, Carlos Mérida, Frank Stella, Bridget Riley, and Jesús Rafael Soto, among others, will complement more contemporary works from the Museum’s collection.

Key highlights from the exhibition include:

• Honduran artist Adán Vallecillo’s Pantones (2013), in which six hanging banners made of moto-taxi covers are placed in dialogue with each other. The work highlights the use of nontraditional materials in Latin American abstraction and encourages viewers to engage with and walk along its stratified banners to examine the visual continuities and obscurities between each layer.

• Venezuelan artist Emilia Azcárate’s La mar de letras (2013), a five-paneled work exploring language and written communication, features illegible strings of letters from an old typewriter in a radiant green ink. By visualizing mechanical, repetitive, and obsessive forms of mark-making on paper, Azcárate creates an indecipherable sea of letters to prompt reflection on the complications and fallibility of language and to turn a coherent system of writing into a complex abstraction.

• Colombian artist Gabriel Sierra’s Sin título (siete conejos) (2001-2013), a sculptural installation consisting of glue and straw bricks arranged in descending scale, continues the artist’s exploration of the languages of design and architecture. Sierra uses straw as a vernacular material for construction to signify humans’ modification of nature and adaptation to the environment. Engaging ideas of community, habitat, and urbanism, Sierra manipulates architectural dynamics to examine the forces governing human interaction with built environments.

• Argentinian artist Sergio Vega’s Shanty Nucleus After Derrida 2 (2011-2013), which presents yellow monochrome planes suspended in space, creates an array of configurations and walkways that enable an interactive viewing experience. These various planes constitute the color ground on which photographs of “shanty” homes have been mounted to create fragmented sculptural formations inspired by Derrida’s theory of deconstruction.

As an exploration of how abstraction is employed in contemporary Latin American art to convey specific emotions, stories, and ideas stemming from the cultural and political zeitgeist, Stories of Abstraction introduces new narratives within the work of Latin American artists. Providing an overview of post-1990s abstraction from various geographies in Latin America, the exhibition seeks to address the multitude of ways in which artwork lacking figuration or recognizable characters can generate insightful commentary and even political change.

“Stories of Abstraction places the Museum at the forefront of conversations surrounding scholarship, exhibition practices, and the global significance of contemporary Latin American art,” said Vicario. “The exhibition will foster new dialogues in the Phoenix community and beyond and provide the opportunity to learn about the significant achievements of Latin America’s foremost abstract artists.”

About the Exhibition

Stories of Abstraction: Contemporary Latin American Art will be on view from May 2 through September 20, 2020 in Steele Gallery. It is organized by Phoenix Art Museum and made possible through the generosity of the Museum’s Circles of Support and Museum Members. The exhibition features objects donated to the Phoenix Art Museum collection by Nicholas Pardon.

This special-engagement exhibition is free for Museum Members; veterans and active-duty military and their families; and youth aged 5 and younger.

General admission:

$23 — Adults

$20 — Senior citizens (Ages 65+)

$18 — Students (with ID)

$14 — Children (Ages 6–17)

All special-engagement exhibitions are included with general admission. During voluntary-donation times when general admission is pay what you wish, admission to Stories of Abstraction is $5. Voluntary-donation times include Wednesdays from
3 – 9 pm and the first Friday of each month from 6 – 10 pm, with free admission for youth 17 and younger on the last Saturday of each month. For a full breakdown of general-admission prices and hours, please see bit.ly/VisitPhxArt.

To request interviews and high-resolution photography, contact the Communications Office of Phoenix Art Museum at 602.307.2003 or samantha.andreacchi@phxart.org.

About Phoenix Art Museum

Since 1959, Phoenix Art Museum has provided millions of guests with access to world-class art and experiences in an effort to ignite imaginations, create meaningful connections, and serve as a brave space for all people who wish to experience the transformative power of art. Located in Phoenix’s Central Corridor, the Museum is a vibrant destination for the visual arts and the largest art museum in the southwestern United States. Each year, more than 300,000 guests engage with critically acclaimed national and international exhibitions and the Museum’s collection of more than 20,000 works of American and Western American, Asian, European, Latin American, modern and contemporary art, and fashion design. The Museum also presents a comprehensive film program, live performances, and educational programs designed for visitors of all ages, along with vibrant photography exhibitions made possible through the Museum’s landmark partnership with the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona. To learn more about Phoenix Art Museum, visit phxart.org, or call 602.257.1880.

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PHOENIX (December 2018) –Phoenix Art Museum is the recipient of a significant gift from Nicholas Pardon, co-founder of the SPACE Collection, the largest collection of post-1990s abstract art from Latin America in the United States featuring major works by artists recognized as the pioneers of their generation. The gift includes 112 artworks by 49 artists from 14 Latin American countries and represents a 280% increase in the Museum’s holdings of contemporary Latin American art. Previously, the Museum’s Latin American art collection included approximately 40 contemporary artworks.

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