Valerie Cassel Oliver is the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Prior to that, she was senior curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas. Her most recent exhibition was “The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse," which embraced Black Southern Hip Hop as a portal to the long trajectory of Black Southern aesthetic sensibilities, and how they have manifested in the visual arts and music.