The Beat Podcast: Rachel Hooper
In today's episode, we sit down with Rachel Hooper, curator of the University of Kentucky Art Museum, to discuss her curatorial work and the museum's upcoming exhibition, Museum of Natural History and Artificial Curiosities, opening August 5.
Rachel Hooper is a seventh-generation Kentuckian and curator of the University of Kentucky Art Museum, where she strategically develops a permanent collection of over 5,000 artworks and organizes the Robert C. May Endowed Speaker Series on photography. After graduating from the School for the Creative and Performing Arts in Lexington, KY, she earned a BA in philosophy and art history at St. Olaf College, an MA in art history from the Williams College Graduate Program in the History of Art, and a Ph.D. in art history at Rice University. Dr. Hooper is an affiliate of the Commonwealth Institute of Black Studies and was one of two curators internationally to be awarded a curatorial fellowship by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in their Fall 2025 grant cycle for her research on Black photojournalism in Lexington during the Civil Rights Movement. She has previously served as a panelist for Community Arts Development grants at LexArts and preservation programs at the National Endowment for the Humanities.
To learn more about the Museum of Natural History and Artificial Curiosities, on view at the UK Art Museum August 5 – December 19, visit finearts.uky.edu/art-museum.
