Helen Anne Molesworth (born 1966, Chickasaw, Alabama) is an American curator of contemporary art based in Los Angeles.
[2] After graduating from the State University of New York at Albany, Molesworth entered the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program.
From 2010 to 2014 Molesworth was the Barbara Lee Chief Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) Boston, where she assembled one person exhibitions of artists Steve Locke, Catherine Opie, Josiah McElheny, and Amy Sillman, and the group exhibitions Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933–1957,[6] Dance/Draw,[7] and This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s.
[9] After her arrival in Los Angeles in 2014 she reinstalled MOCA's permanent collection galleries, co-organized a survey exhibition of Kerry James Marshall that traveled to Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, organized Anna Maria Maiolino’s first US retrospective, and forged a partnership between MOCA and The Underground Museum.
"[13] Molesworth has long spoken publicly about the lack of diversity and equity in art institutions and the difficulties she has encountered in mounting exhibitions by non-male artists and artists of color—in a lecture to the UCLA Design Media Arts department on January 18, 2018, she said: “I don’t think there’s any way for MOCA to not be a white space.
The 21-artist show examined the history taught in American schools through the issues left insufficiently addressed in educational curricula, most notably race, and continues Molesworth's critique of institutional spaces and power structures.
[21] Molesworth is the author of numerous catalogue essays and her writing has appeared in publications such as Artforum, Art Journal, Documents, and October.