OVERVIEW
The Delaware Contemporary presents Shifting Perspectives: Art in America, the 2026 Gretchen Hupfel Symposium—a day of conversation, reflection, and exchange exploring the evolving landscape of contemporary art in America.
Bringing together artists, curators, cultural leaders, and community voices, the symposium will examine how art reflects and responds to the changing social, cultural, and creative landscape around us. Through engaging discussions, artist-led conversations, exhibition experiences, and opportunities for dialogue, attendees are invited to consider whose perspectives shape contemporary art, how those perspectives are changing, and what that means for artists, institutions, and communities today.
Established in honor of conceptual artist Gretchen Hupfel, the symposium continues her legacy of creative inquiry by creating space for thoughtful conversation, diverse perspectives, and new ways of seeing and understanding contemporary art.
Schedule
11:00AM - Check-in begins
11:30AM - Welcome remarks
~ Raye Jones Avery, Art Administrator and Arts Advocate
11:45AM - Panel Discussion: The State of the Arts: Delaware's Cultural Landscape
Participants:
~ Jordan Resh, Engagement & Operations Coordinator, Delaware Arts Alliance
~ Shyshekia Edwards, Executive Director, Christiana Cultural Arts Center
~ A.T. Moffett, Executive Director, Delaware Institute for the Arts in Education
Moderator: Michelle Schiavoni, The Delaware Contemporary
12:15PM-1:00PM - Lunch
1:00PM - Curator Led: Gallery Exhibitions
Participants:
~ Rebecca “Little Turtle Who Sees” Jackson-Square Ed.S, Exhibition: “We Were Always Here”
~ Elizabeth Bergeland, Exhibition: “I Thought I Would_____by Now”
1:30PM - Fireside Chat: Who Gets to Be Seen? Identity, Inclusion & Representation in Contemporary Art
Participants:
~ Rebecca “Little Turtle Who Sees” Jackson-Square Ed.S, Program Director, Native Artists Pathways Fellowship
~ Ryan Grover, Director, Rockwood Park & Museum
2:15PM - Break: Networking & Connect
2:30PM - Fireside Chat: No Longer in the Box: Redefining the Contemporary Artist
Participants:
~ Ashley SK Davis, Creative Director, Pieces of a Dream
~ Oscar De Paz, Visual Artist + TDC Studio Artist
~ Traci Currie, Ph.D., Spoken Word Artist
Moderator: Erica Loustau, The Gretchen Hupfel Curator of Contemporary Art, The Delaware Contemporary, and Former Chair of The Department of Sculpture, West Chester University
3:15PM - Live Performance
3:45PM-4:00PM - Closing Remarks & Recognitions
ABOUT our PARTICIPANTS
Jordan Resh
Engagement & Operations Coordinator, Delaware Arts Alliance
Jordan is a native of Dover, Delaware, and graduate of Dover High School. Jordan continued her education at Brandeis University where she completed a Bachelor of Science in Health Policy, Peace, and Social Justice. Jordan then returned to Delaware and began her professional career with the Downtown Dover Partnership, working to help advance community redevelopment projects and revitalize the district, with a focus in the arts and implementing creative placemaking strategies. During this time, Jordan became an active member of the Dover Art League, starting as a student and progressing to join their Board of Directors. Jordan is also a graduate of Leadership Central Delaware, a Certified Tourism Ambassador through Kent County Tourism, and NASCAR staff for Dover Motor Speedway.
Jordan is passionate about advocating on behalf of her community to improve quality of life, increase access to creative spaces, and promote arts opportunities that are welcoming to everyone. Jordan is a lifelong art lover, performing in Dover High School’s Marching Band and attending various arts and cultural events throughout the state. Jordan can now be found expressing herself creatively by experiencing local venues, crafting with friends, or working on her latest stained-glass project.
A.T. Moffett
Executive Director, Delaware Institute for the Arts in Education
A.T. Moffett serves as the Executive Director for the Delaware Institute for Arts in Education. Prior to this role, she was a Professor of Dance at Washington College in Chestertown, MD. She danced professionally in NYC, Philadelphia, and Minneapolis. She holds an MA in Urban Affairs and Public Policy from UD and an MFA in Dance from the University of Oregon.
Rebecca L. Jackson-Square (Ed.S)
Program Director, Native Artists Pathways Fellowship
Rebecca "Little Turtle Who Sees" Jackson-Square has been creating art since age seven, using mixed media as a tool for storytelling and self-discovery. A proud Two-Spirit Indigenous artist, published poet, and Founding Artist of Native Creative Arts, Rebecca serves as Director of the Native Artists Pathways Fellowship (NAPF)—a program dedicated to centering and amplifying the voices of Indigenous artists across the region.
Rebecca's work reflects a deeply personal journey of reconnection, resilience, and reclamation. Adopted out of her tribe in the late 1970s and placed in a white household, she reunited with her birth family two years ago and re-grounded with the Nanticoke Tribe of Millsboro, Delaware—an experience that continues shaping her artistic vision.
For over a decade, Rebecca has taught community and youth arts, using creative expression for healing and empowerment. Her work, inspired by East Coast Powwows and relationships with plants, animals, elements, and spirits, embodies themes of Indigenous rights and the journey of returning home after adoption.
With a doctoral degree in Educational Leadership, Rebecca has continued to consult with arts and education institutions, bridging the gap between both worlds. With over 25 years in education and public service, she lives among families in Philadelphia and Delaware, remaining committed to honoring ancestors and using art as a bridge between tradition and transformation.
Elizabeth Bergeland
Visual Artsit
Elizabeth Bergeland (b. 1983 in Wyoming/Colorado, USA) is a Philadelphia-based painter whose visually rich work blends figurative realism with surreal or imagined spaces. Her symbolic and emotionally resonant paintings reflect deeply personal themes such as connection, doubt, and the passage of time.
Bergeland earned a BFA in Painting and Anthropology from the University of Colorado in 2006 and later relocated to Philadelphia, where she now works and lives with her husband and three children.
Her paintings often dramatize modern existential fears, feelings of being overwhelmed by productivity, digital demands, and the weight of womanhood and motherhood. A recurring narrative in her work involves sunburns as metaphorical markers of worry, and gestural imagery, like tagged chickens or reaching hands, that underscore the tensions between connection and solitude.
Bergeland has exhibited nationally, most recently mounting her first museum solo exhibition, I Thought I Would _____ By Now, in 2026 at the Delaware Contemporary Art Museum. She presented her 2025 solo, While You Were Sleeping, at Studio 105 at Ray, was spotlighted in the 2024 SPRING/BREAK Art Show, and debuted her first solo exhibition, Quiet Boy, at Hotbed Gallery in Philadelphia in 2022. Her work has also been featured in publications such as Smithsonian Magazine, Arts In Square Magazine, Create Magazine, Philadelphia Magazine, Friend of the Artist, 1st Look TV, Root Quarterly, Artit Magazine and The Visionary Projects.
She is also an acclaimed illustrator of children’s books, having illustrated Being Edie is Hard Today (2019) and The Great Whipplethorp Bug Collection (2021). The latter was awarded a Kirkus Star, received an NPR review, and was listed among Smithsonian Magazine’s “10 Best Children’s Books of 2021.” Her illustrations are part of the Society of Illustrators Museum’s permanent collection.
Ryan Grover
Director, Rockwood Park & Museum
Ryan Grover is the Director of New Castle County’s Rockwood Park & Museum and was previously the Curator at the Biggs Museum of American Art in Dover. Grover built his career hosting over 100 feature exhibitions on regional and national artists, publishing more than a dozen exhibition catalogues; managing capital improvement projects; crafting original projects with hundreds of regional artists; expanding representation to artistic projects with the African American, Latin American and Lenape populations of Delaware and doubling the size of the Biggs’ permanent collection.
Ashley SK Davis
Creative Director, Pieces of a Dream
Ashley SK Davis (formally Ashley L. Sullivan-Kirksey) is a native of Wilmington, Delaware. She began her stage career at the age of 3 and is formally trained in Ballet, Modern, Tap, Jazz, Hip Hop, African dance forms, and Irish Step dancing. A graduate of Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, Ashley was quite involved with the arts while on campus. As a member of the Spelman College Dance Theatre and Mahogany in Motion Dance Team, Ashley studied under Nathan Trice, a regular choreographer for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre. In addition to the countless productions in which she performed, she also directed and choreographed for several shows including the Ms. Spelman Coronation for Spelman College and the Miss Black and Gold Pageant for Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Incorporated. Ashley’s dance credits also include serving as a dancer for Usher and an assistant choreographer for Six Flags Fright Fest. In 2007, Ashley's choreography was presented as a part of the Spelman College Department of Drama and Dance 75th Anniversary Celebration, which included a new stage play by Pearl Cleage about the life of Coretta Scott King. In addition to serving as the Executive and Artistic Director of Pieces of a Dream, Inc., Ashley is also a Teaching Artist in Drama and Dance for the Delaware Institute for the Arts in Education (DIAE) and the Wolf Trap Institute, an organization dedicated to arts-infused early education. Ashley also teaches for Steppin' Out Dance Center (Oxford, PA) and First State Ballet Theatre (Wilmington, DE).
Traci Currie, Ph.D.
Spoken Word Artist
Dr. Traci Evadne Currie has been in the field of communication studies for over 25 years as a spoken word artist, university professor, teaching artist, multidisciplinary facilitator, youth arts program director, and mixed media artist-activist. Her passion is fueled by the work she has done with youth in public schools and the juvenile detention system, as well as by art programs focused on aging populations and veterans. Her focus is on compassion-building, trauma, and creating inclusive environments in exclusive spaces. This Jamaican American artist is a 2022 Anaphora Writing Fellow, a 2024 University of Delaware Poetry As Activism Poet-in-Residence, a former state coordinator for Poetry Out Loud in Delaware, and currently an Assistant Professor at Goldey-Beacom College.
Oscar De Paz
Visual Artist + TDC Studio Artist
Oscar Eduardo de Paz is a contemporary painter and writer based in Wilmington, Delaware. Working across painting, poetry, artist books, zines and public programs, de Paz constructs layered visual narratives that examine memory, family, migration, poverty, policing, food, care, and the sociopolitical systems that shape American life. Rooted in personal experience and his Guatemalan family background, his work moves between autobiography and collective history, using symbolic objects, figures, archival fragments, and text to make visible the emotional and political pressures carried by the individual, the home, and the community.
His work can be situated within a contemporary American history-painting tradition, using ordinary people, domestic spaces, working-class objects, and fragments of everyday life to examine larger questions of identity, power, and cultural memory. Through recurring symbols, archival materials, handwritten language, and autobiographical narrative, de Paz creates work in which personal and communal lived experience and public history intersect.
De Paz studied philosophy and public administration and policy at West Chester University and continued academic research at the University of Delaware, focusing on environmental injustice and community-based solutions. His practice brings this background in social and environmental justice into dialogue with painting, treating art as a form of critical inquiry, poetic testimony, and cultural reflection.
De Paz has exhibited with Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles, completed the ARC Residency at The Delaware Contemporary, and presented several solo exhibitions in Wilmington such as his 2026 solo exhibition, An American Son, at Chris White Gallery in Wilmington, which traced de Paz’s journey from childhood poverty to fatherhood, community, and artistic emergence through his Poetic Symbolic Representation approach. His work has been commissioned and acquired by the Delaware Art Museum, and his artist books have entered the Chicago Public Library’s Northside History Collection. His practice has also been the subject of a documentary presented at the Delaware Art Museum, and he continues to work across exhibitions, publications, curatorial projects, and public programs.
Resource Partner & Vendor Table
Registration Fee: $50.00 per organization
Community organizations and resource partners are invited to participate with a tabletop display and connect with symposium attendees throughout the day.
Resource Partner Registration Includes:
~ Designated space for one tabletop display
~ One chair provided by The Delaware Contemporary
~ Admission for one organization representative
~ Lunch for one organization representative
~ Inclusion on the symposium resource partner listing
~ Organization logo featured in select symposium promotional materials
~ Placement map and event information provided prior to the symposium
The $50.00 registration covers one representative only. Organizations wishing to have an additional representative present must purchase a $25.00 general admission symposium ticket for that individual.
Participating organizations are responsible for providing their own table and all tabletop materials, signage, and displays. Resource tables are intended for information, outreach, and community engagement only. No sales or commercial transactions are permitted.
After registering, organizations will be asked to provide their organization name, logo, representative name, email address, and phone number for event coordination and promotional purposes.
Space is limited, and advance registration is required.
