2025-26 visiting artist Vanessa German included a three-performance series that started at Univeristy of Louisville’s Gottschalk Hall last October. (Katya Gimro / Provided)For the last two years, New Jersey native Diallo Simon-Ponte has traveled back and forth to Ghana, creating a contemporary ar t and architecture museum with a group of fellow creatives. Co-founding the Limbo Museum in Accra and previous experience with art museums in New York informed what Simon-Ponte called his “curatorial ethos.”“It's like how can I inflect and make sure that the work I'm doing at the museum and at the institution is responsible for the betterment and kind of sustainability of the local creative ecosystem here,” he said.In 2025, Simon-Ponte was appointed the first assistant curator of the Speed Art Museum’s inaugural Sam Gilliam Visiting Artist Program, named after the late Louisville painter and sculptor. The program invites artists to curate exhibitions, blending their respective mediums with Louisville history and culture. Simon-Ponte said he wants future projects to spotlight budding talent and honor Gilliam’s legacy.Diallo Simon Pointe has served a artistic curator at other museums across New York before coming to Louisville. (Giselle Rhoden / LPM)The Speed invites two artists each year to work directly with Louisville residents to craft their work.“When I came, it was working really collaboratively and prefacing the question to people in the community to kind of figure out what people wanted the program to look like and how it should manifest,” Simon-Ponte said.During this process, the artists follow “a three-tiered system.”“The first is the presentation of work, and that can kind of look like and take the form of an exhibition, a kind of performance series, a symposium,” Simon-Ponte said. “The second is two to three technical sessions, which are really kind of workshops that teach tangible and hard technical skills to different communities that are here. And the last is a kind of final culminating conversation.”For the upcoming 2026-27 residency, The Speed selected Brooklyn photographer Deana Lawson and Louisville-native sculptor Brandon Ndife.This is the first time the museum selected a Louisvillian, and, as Simon-Ponte explained, this was an opportunity to support a local, early-career artist.“Sam Gilliam was not recognized and celebrated at the Speed Art Museum until he represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in Italy,” he said. “I want to rectify the mistakes of what the Speed has done in the past, and being like, ‘Oh, we're only going to celebrate one of our own until they've kind of achieved a certain kind of acclaim.’ So Brandon was chosen because I wanted to also engender the museum and the resources around it to also be in and kind of contribute to the concerted growth of him.”At a University of Louisville studio in Portland, Ndife will converge old furniture and sculpture work, Simon-Ponte said.“He takes these domestic furniture objects of armoires, of chairs, of kind of benches, and will almost rewild them with ecological elements that entomb decay and growth,” Simon-Ponte said.Simon-Ponte said Ndife’s work was inspired by his upbringing.“His mother and father were both agricultural scientists,” Simon-Ponte said. “When he and his mother would take walks when he was a child, she would ask him to pick up leaves off the ground and identify them. So he's taking fragments of the built environment. So he's recreating sidewalks and traffic partitions and traffic medians, and then almost like eroding them.”As a former employee at the Beecher Terrace housing complex, Ndife’s work will represent deserted areas of west Louisville. Simon-Ponte said the exhibition will challenge what development looks like in disinvested communities.“You develop the architecture and you create a new ‘investment,’ but what does it look like to create different food resources around it?” Simon-Ponte said. “What does it look like to create further space for community gathering?”He noted the new community center across from Beecher Terrace, yet said he feels more investment is needed.Ndife’s exhibition opens Nov. 13.The 2025-26 visiting arts will end their residencies this year.Vanessa German's "...do you remember when you are the sky" is open at the Speed until Sunday. (Katya Gimro / Provided)Pittsburgh-based sculptor and painter Vanessa German concludes her residency on Sunday. Since last year, German has worked with University of Louisville professor Felicia Jamison to create a three-day performance series and an art installation based on the Louisville Industrial School of Reform “Colored Girl Dormitory” from 1896.At the time, 15 Black girls were physically abused by facility staff, starved and isolated from other children before three of them attempted to escape. The University of Louisville bought the building in 1923 and it currently houses the school’s social science department.“Across these three days of performance, Vanessa invited people to make marks on a series of canvas to cathartically respond in the sight of poems,” Simon-Ponte said about German’s work. “They could share phrases and share a series of offerings. We sent all of this material that people participated in the making of across these three-day performance series back to her studio, and she turned them into sculptures that we then kind of exhibited at the Speed.”Textile artist and second visiting creative Eric Mack models the program’s late namesake. “Rare Essence” is a larger installation suspended from the ceiling in the Speed’s Gheen Court.Mack takes direct inspiration from Gilliam’s layers of painted textiles, which are permanently displayed at the Speed, with a contemporary flare, Simon-Ponte said. The installation is open until Nov. 29.Simon-Ponte said he intends to invite creatives of different specialities to curate work at the Speed and work with these artists to create “educational and experimental experiences” for museum audiences.“I want people to feel that they have participated in something that they can also be emotional, that they can cry, that they can be held within the kind of things that they're thinking about, and also then come back several months later and have that experience again,” he said. ...read more read less