Dr. Barthwell Evans will be in conversation with Asmaa Walton, the 2019-2020 Romare Bearden Graduate Fellow at the St. Louis Art Museum.

Tell Your Bearden Story is a new series of the Foundation’s Oral History Project that aims to highlight the real encounters of Bearden’s friends and family. These stories illuminate new perspectives and round out what scholars and researchers often miss about histories.

About Dr. Barthwell Evans

Dr. Barthwell Evans is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of The Barthwell Group, Detroit-based strategic management consulting firm. Prior to launching The Barthwell Group, Dr. Evans was an accomplished banker, lawyer, and management consultant.

As a Managing Director at JPMorgan, Dr. Evans developed, launched, and managed two national businesses and attained five securities licenses while at that firm. She became the first woman manager in the consulting practice of Coopers & Lybrand’s Detroit office, has advised Fortune 500 corporations, and developed a Financial Management Institute for the CEOs of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (“HBCUs”). This includes, but is not limited to, the Yale Law School Fund Board, the Yale Law School Executive Committee, Bennett College for Women (North Carolina), the American Folk Art Museum, and the Romare Bearden Foundation. Dr. Evans is the Founder and served for many years as the chairperson of The Friends of Education at The Museum of Modern Art, in New York City. Dr. Evans is a graduate of Barnard College and Yale Law School where she was a Co-Marshall of her class and won the Edward R. Robbins Memorial Prize for her writing. She holds a Ph.D. and M.Phil. from Columbia University.

Asmaa Walton is a Detroit native and the founder of The Black Art Library. The library is a collection of books she began curating on Black visual arts in early 2020 that will act as an educational resource for the Black community first and foremost. Walton has a Master of Arts in Arts Politics from New York University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art Education from Michigan State University. She most recently was the 2019-2020 Romare Bearden Graduate Museum Fellow at the Saint Louis Art Museum and was previously the inaugural KeyBank Diversity Leadership Fellow at the Toledo Museum of Art.

Asmaa was also recently featured in Hyperallergic for her current work as the founder of the Black Art Library. Check her out here:  https://hyperallergic.com/599847/how-a-black-art-library-quickly-gained-momentum/