Rujeko Hockley is an associate curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Born in Harare, Zimbabwe, she joined the Whitney in 2017, where she co-curated the 2019 Whitney Biennial (with Jane Panetta). Her most recent show, Amy Sherald: American Sublime (until 10 August), highlights the artist’s reinvigoration of American realism in the context of Black subjectivity.
We caught up with Hockley at Frieze to show us around.
Joey Terrill
Still-Life with Triumeq, Art catalogs and a Brown Window Washer (2025, above)
Ortuzar
“I love the idea of new media with three-dimensional and biographical elements, thinking about ageing as a gay man with lots of signififers of his own experience.”
Photo: Steven Molina Contreras
Chitra Ganesh
Tree of Life (2024)
Hales Gallery
“Chitra has such a broad practice—she’s interested in a configuration of mythology, sculpture, printmaking and is always getting so many elements involved in her practice.”
Photo: Steven Molina Contreras
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley
Public Gallery
“Danielle is thinking a lot about how gaming, the virtual and contemporary art can intersect. The questions she’s asking us about living in a world that is hospitable to Black trans people are so pertinent right now—it’s a provocation, but it’s also a literal question.”
Photo: Steven Molina Contreras
Ernie Barnes
Study II for the Dream Unfolds (1995)
Andrew Kreps Gallery
“Ernie Barnes was the person responsible for J.J.'s paintings on the show Good Times, but as a real-life artist, it’s been fascinating to see his transformation in the market, and also the movement of someone who was not in the mainstream during his lifetime and was supported by a Black middle-class, direct-to-consumer sales model into a completely different trajectory. Go Knicks!”
Photo: Steven Molina Contreras
Jeremy Frey
Enchanted (2025)
Karma
“This is a tiny, tiny miniature basket that’s so beautiful and incorporates Indigenous craft techniques from the artist’s own tribe—it’s an impossible vessel, but you can imagine the little objects you can put into it. I’m drawn to the pops of colour and the use of ashwood.”
Photo: Steven Molina Contreras
Maia Ruth Lee
B.B.Lettuce 1-2 (2025)
Francois Ghebaly
“I love Maia’s work. This work is from her Bondage Baggage series, which is based on the bags that migrants from across the globe often bring with them when they come home. These paintings are prints of the patterns on these bags created by the striations of the ropes wrapping these objects.”
Photo: Steven Molina Contreras
Beverly Buchanan
Andrew Edlin Gallery
“I’ve always loved her shack sculptures—there’s a precarity to them, thinking about vernacular building techniques and the ways in which people who don’t have access to official methods of building still have architectural creativity in their lives.”
Photo: Steven Molina Contreras
Luana Vitra
Serie Giro/Series Giro (2025)
Mitre Galeria
“I like the rocks and found objects from nature and the world—it’s interesting to think about the way mining has impacted the natural world in Brazil, and that feels very present to me here.”