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Commencement Honorees

Each year, MassArt confers Honorary Doctorates of Fine Arts in recognition of individuals' outstanding contributions to the arts. This year the degrees will be conferred upon these individuals:

  • Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts - Lowery Stokes Sims
  • Excellence in Art Education Award - To be announced

Lowery Stokes Sims

Lowery Stokes Sims

Lowery Stokes Sims is Curator at the Museum of Arts and Design.  From 2000-2007 Sims served as executive director, president and adjunct curator for the permanent collection at The Studio Museum in Harlem. She was on the education and curatorial staff of The Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1972-1999.

A specialist in modern and contemporary art Sims is known for her particular expertise in the work of African, Latino, Native and Asian American artists, and her work on the Afro-Cuban Chinese Surrealist artist Wifredo Lam was published by the University of Texas Press in 2002. Sims co-curated the inaugural exhibition, Second Lives, for MAD's 2008 re-opening in its new space on New York's Columbus Circle.

In 2010 she organized the Museum's venue for the traveling exhibition, Bigger Better More: the Art of Viola Frey, co-curated Dead or Alive and curated The Global Africa Project. Among the many exhibitions she organized at The Metropolitan Museum of Art were retrospectives of the work of Stuart Davis (1991) and Richard Pousette-Dart (1997).

Sims has lectured nationally and internationally and guest curated numerous exhibitions most recently at the National Gallery, Kingston, Jamaica (2004), The Cleveland Museum of Art and the New York Historical Society (2006) and the Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, College Park (2009). She served as general editor and essayist of the catalogue for the National Museum of the American Indian's 2008 retrospective of Fritz Scholder.

In 2003-04 Sims served on the jury for the memorial for the World Trade Center and between 2004 and 2006 served as the chair of the Cultural Institutions Group, a coalition of museums, zoos, botanical gardens and performing organizations funded by the City of New York. Sims was a fellow at the Clark Art Institute in spring 2007.

In 2005 and 2006 she was Visiting Professor at Queens College and Hunter College in New York City and in fall 2007 Visiting Scholar in the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Sims is on the board of ArtTable, Inc., the Tiffany Foundation, Art Matters, Inc. and The Alliance of Artists Communities.