Jeff Kenney

Jeffrey Kenney is Associate Curator for ​Mason Exhibitions​ and the School of Art. Kenney is responsible for coordination of art exhibitions and related programming for the Gillespie Gallery of Art in the Art and Design Building (Fairfax), the Buchanan Atrium Gallery at Buchanan Hall (Fairfax), and the Buchanan Partners Gallery at the Hylton Performing Arts Center (Manassas).

At the center of Kenney’s curatorial philosophy is attention and sensitivity to the art, ideas, and events that are shaping our collective experience in the first decades of the 21st century. He believes that art exhibitions in the academic setting should responsibly explore and contextualize the issues that concern and affect the individual lives of students and their communities, while providing accessible connection points to the diverse art practices, perspectives, and social currents that inform contemporary visual culture.

Kenney’s recent curatorial highlights at Mason include: ​Wickerham & Lomax: Selection​, surveying ten years of the duo’s output including sculptural tableaux and large-scale computer generated paintings that explore the impact of digital technologies on the formation of queer subjectivity and social spaces; ​Angela Washko: Poking the Hive​,​ focusing on the artist’s virtual performances and feminist interventions in multiplayer online role-playing video games; ​Ricardo Vicente Jose Ruiz & Hyun Gi: Signals That Invoke 100 Years of Blue Milk​, a two person show of paintings and video installation revolving around the artists’ shared concerns with the generative power of folklore, personal memoir and socio-political histories in their respective Indigenous/Mexican American and Korean/American backgrounds; and ​Katherine Thompson: Raw Material,​ showcasing the Mason School of Art alumnus’s recent self-portrait photographs that embrace the visual language of product and fashion advertisements while posing questions about the troublesome connections between consumerism and race in America.

Kenney received an MFA from VCU and a BFA Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. He has been with the School of Art since 2013 and has been coordinating exhibitions for galleries and other venues since 2004. He has also taught studio art courses for GMU and Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU).