Homelands Curators Receive SECAC Award
Associate Professor Lisa King’s work on an exhibition of Native Art at the McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture has been recognized with an award for curatorial excellence.
The curators of the Homelands: Connecting to Mounds through Native Art exhibition at the McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture have national recognition.
Associate Professor Lisa King in the Department of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, is among the recipients of the 2025 SECAC Award for Curatorial Excellence. Also included are the McClung’s Sadie Counts, curator of cultural collections, and former Assistant Director Cat Shteynberg, as well as co-curators from four Native Nations with ties to Knox County.
Presented at the SECACs 81st meeting in October, the annual award recognizes exhibition curators for exemplary design, publication, and/or community engagement. The awards committee was impressed by the scale and reach of Homelands, as well as the project’s wider impact and engagement, according to a SECAC news release.
The nomination for the award noted, “With a total of thirteen voices at any given point in the process representing an array of political and cultural values, the exhibition came together to tell a compelling story about the importance of mounds and sacred landscapes to contemporary Indigenous communities.”
The awards recipients in addition to King, Shteynberg, and Counts are: representatives from Cherokee Nation; from the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, Linda Langley and Raynella Fontenot; from the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians, Dakota Brown and Miranda Panther; and from the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, RaeLynn Butler, Emman Spain, and Turner Hunt.
SECAC, formerly the Southeastern College Art Conference, promotes education and research in the visual arts and includes individual and institutional members from across the United States and around the world.
By Amy Beth Miller