Arianna Nourse is an internationally-engaged, independent cultural producer, writer and curator. Her practice aims to broaden our understanding and expectations around hybridity in both formal and lived terms.
Nourse began her career at Phillips auction house in New York, where she became the company’s first Black specialist in contemporary art and photography. She now partners with leading artists and collectors to develop innovative exhibitions, collections, and wider projects from conception to finissage. Her curatorial practice insists on artistic curiosity and risk-taking, and values the “making of” as much as any resulting object.
Over Frieze London 2023, Nourse curated A Requiem for Benevolent Beasts, a psychoanalytic two person show of new work by Leyla Faye and Brianna Rose Brooks. The exhibition explored power plays between children and smaller creatures; horizontal identities; and the cathartic possibilities of collaborative art making.
In 2022, Nourse curated Respectability won’t save you: a Caribbean haunting, the New York solo debut of acclaimed Bajan-Scottish artist Alberta Whittle. The show mined the artist’s personal family histories; unearthed new portrayals of mixed race, middle class personal rebellion; and expanded the lexicon on Black diasporic experience via newly conceived sculptural-paintings, writings and film.
Nourse’s 2021 essay and exhibition, On Error and Continuity: Some Passing Thoughts, considered the works of Adrian Piper, Sula Bermúdez-Silverman, and Alberta Whittle via the hybrid form of auto-biography, art criticism and poetry for Tiana Webb Evans's Jamaican-New York project Yard Concept.
Nourse has been curator and cultural advisor to Southbank Tower, a residential property in London, as well as to the private collections of numerous high-profile global citizens who wish to remain anonymous.
Nourse is a member of Entre Nous, an invitational association of Black female art dealers founded by White Cube’s Courtney Willis Blair; and sits on the committee of Frieze fair’s Frieze 91 in London. She is the daughter of two artists; the mother of two children; and loves speculative fiction. She is currently executive producer of In the Black Fantastic, a film by Ekow Eshun and julianknxx due for release in 2025.
