Jared Ledesma is Associate Curator at the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa. The Des Moines Art Center is a nationally renowned modern and contemporary art museum with an esteemed permanent collection, and an art school that offers studio classes for artists of all ages. Since arriving at the Art Center in 2017, Ledesma has organized more than a dozen exhibitions. This includes Queer Abstraction (2019-2020), the Art Center’s first exhibition in its 70-year history to focus on gender and sexuality. The exhibition earned a commendation from the 2019 Sotheby’s Prize jury for its groundbreaking scholarship and the 2020 SECAC Award for Outstanding Exhibition and Catalog of Contemporary Materials. Other exhibitions Ledesma has organized include Hedda Sterne: Imagination and Machine (2020), Jeffrey Gibson: I Was Here (2019), The Art Students League of New York (2018-2019), and I, too, am America (2017). Currently, Ledesma is working on Louis Fratino: Tenderness revealed, a major exhibition opening on November 13, 2021.

Before working at the Des Moines Art Center, Ledesma was curatorial assistant in the department of painting and sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). Ledesma is originally from the San Francisco Bay Area and holds both a BA and MA in art history from San Francisco State University.

The book mentioned in the interview was The Householders by Robert Duncan and Jess.

The images below are from an upcoming show by Olivia Valentine who has also been interviewed previously here.

Olivia Valentine, Mediate/Equivocate mockup for the exhibition “Iowa Artists 2021: Olivia Valentine,” presented at the Des Moines Art Center, March 12–May 16, 2021.

Not of longing, but of light, 2019, Plaster, rabbit skin glue, watercolor. Photo: Olivia Valentine © Olivia Valentine