Profile
Erica DiBenedetto is a curator and art historian specializing in art from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. Her scholarship concerns the boundaries of art history as a discipline, often focusing on artworks that incorporate other fields of knowledge, such as anthropology and architecture. These subjects allow her to rethink metaphorical and spatial dividing lines of various kinds, from disciplinary structures to geographical borders. Informed by her academic training in Western modernism and her professional experience in global contemporary art, Erica’s current projects concentrate on artists from Africa, Europe, and the United States.
As a curatorial associate at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, she works on exhibitions related to Africa and the African Diaspora in the Department of Painting and Sculpture. She was previously a Museum Research Consortium Fellow in the same department. At MoMA, she has been part of the curatorial teams for Isaac Julien: Lessons of the Hour (2024), Signals: How Video Transformed the World (2023), Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: World Unbound (2022), and New Order: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century (2019).
In 2023, Erica defended her dissertation, “Drafting Methods: Architecture and Language in Sol LeWitt’s Art, 1960–1980.” The dissertation argues that LeWitt explored, and then redefined, the relationship between artist and audience in his work by treating architecture and language as complementary, rules-based systems. Her research received various fellowships, including a Donald and Mary Hyde Summer Research Award from Princeton University, the Patricia and Phillip Frost Predoctoral Fellowship from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Morgan-Menil Predoctoral Fellowship from the Morgan Library and Museum and the Menil Collection.
In addition to her Ph.D., Erica holds a master’s degree from the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art and an interdisciplinary bachelor’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University. Her prior appointments include a guest curatorship at the Menil Drawing Institute, where she co-organized Dream Monuments: Drawing in the 1960s and 1970s (2021), as well as curatorial positions and graduate internships at the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Williams College Museum of Art, and the Princeton University Art Museum. She participated in the Center for Curatorial Leadership’s Mellon Foundation Seminar in 2017.
Selected Publications
“A Woman in the World: Everlyn Nicodemus,” post: notes on art in a global context, published October 2, 2024.
“Martha Rosler, If It’s Too Bad to Be True, It Could Be Disinformation,” in Signals: How Video Transformed the World, eds. Stuart Comer and Michelle Kuo (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2023), 78.
“Scripts for the Land: Felice Lucero’s Paintings Layer Her Tongue and Terrain” (co-author Kelly Montana), Art in America, November 2022, 72–77.
“Monumental Dreams: A Story for Houston, ca. 1969,” The Menil Collection Online Publications, published May 17, 2021.
“LeWitt’s Locations, to a Point,” in Locating Sol LeWitt, ed. David Areford (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), 147–175.
“Pedagogical Perspectives—Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College, 1933–1957,” exhibition review, Art Journal 76:2 (Summer, 2017): 162–165.
“Sol LeWitt,” in Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker (De Gruyter, 2015).
“Gridding the Subject: Sol LeWitt’s Autobiography,” in Sol LeWitt: The Well-Tempered Grid, exhibition catalogue, ed. Charles W. Haxthausen (Williams College Museum of Art, distributed by D.A.P., 2012), 45–59.