Graduate Student Profile: Axelle Toussaint

Axelle Toussaint is a 7th year PhD candidate in the History of Art and Visual Culture. During the 2024-2025 academic year, she was part of the inaugural cohort of THI Moving Image Lab Yearlong Public Fellows and worked at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Early in her PhD program, she also received support from The Humanities Institute as a 2019-20 SSRC-DPD Fellow. We talked with her about her experience working on Isaac Julien’s retrospective exhibition, the connections between her scholarship and work as a curator, and how this fellowship has helped open opportunities for the future.

Hi Axelle, we’re excited to catch up with you about your work as a THI Moving Image Lab Public Fellow at the de Young Museum. Could you tell us about your fellowship there? What kind of work were you doing?

I was specifically hired to provide curatorial assistance on Isaac Julien’s retrospective, I Dream a World, which opened at the de Young museum in April 2025. I worked under the supervision of Claudia Schmuckli, Curator-in-Charge in the Contemporary Art and Programming department. When my fellowship started in September 2024, the exhibition was already well underway. I had expressed some interest in getting more experience in the writing of exhibition didactics, and that is exactly what I got to do. The first portion of my fellowship was devoted to getting up close and personal with the work of Isaac Julien–watching all his films, reading everything that has been written about him, taking notes, writing bits and pieces about passages of the films that I felt personally drawn to or that seemed important–and eventually writing the first draft of the didactics right before the winter break.

My fellowship also involved partaking in the nitty-gritty work of a curatorial department–updating checklists, adding and editing object entries in TMS (the museum’s online archive), editing texts for the exhibition catalogue, compiling bibliographies, liaising with other museum departments such as Publications, Interpretation, or Registration, etc. I also conducted preparatory research for two upcoming exhibitions that I’m not sure I’m allowed to talk about just yet ; )

It sounds like you gained amazing experience! What are some of the things that drew you to this fellowship?

I’ve always wanted to pursue a career in museums. I have worked in various museums and art institutions for the past ten years, in different departments, in order to understand how the institution as a whole works, and to assess where I could do my best work given my skill set.

I find curatorial work extremely stimulating, both aesthetically and intellectually. It allows me to bring my academic background to a very practical end, to create a new object in the world that can be experienced by the general public. I enjoy the fact that it is much more accessible than an academic publication.

We’re curious about how your fellowship work relates to your dissertation and how you think about the relationship between the museum and the university. Can you tell us about the connection between this fellowship and your research and academic interests? What are some of the skills you brought to this fellowship as a PhD student?

Curatorial work is fueled by academic research done outside of the museum. Curators rely on the work of academics when they conceptualize exhibitions.

My dissertation focuses on the visual culture of a section of the African diaspora, and most of the work that I have done at the de Young, in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF), had to do with artists in diaspora. I was fortunate enough to work with curator Claudia Schmuckli, who shares a passion for bringing visibility to artists coming from underrepresented communities, and who assigned me projects that corresponded with my research interests.

In the course of my PhD, I created and taught a course on the contemporary art practices of the African diaspora, which focused on the visual culture of slavery and its echoes across contemporary diasporic art. In this course, we also talked about the history (and histories) of the Black diasporas, discussed the impact of identity on global contemporary art practices, and thought deeply about the themes and aesthetic currents that animate the work of artists such as Kehinde Wiley, Yinka Shonibare, Wangechi Mutu, among others. This knowledge proved particularly useful for historicizing and contextualizing Isaac Julien’s (he is of Caribbean descent) moving-image practice within the diaspora.

As a PhD student, I have substantial experience conducting research in libraries, databases, and archives. Having studied at UCSC, I am partial to transdisciplinary and transhistorical approaches to the material at hand, thinking across disciplines and time periods to create dynamic conversations around the art that is being shown–conversations that have proven to be most appealing to museum audiences.

We’d also love to hear about some of the new things you have learned in your fellowship. What is something that you have taken away from your work at the de Young Museum? 

I got to work on a prospective exhibition that is completely outside of my area of expertise, and it’s been a learning experience. It showed me that there is a great deal of intellectual versatility and flexibility that is needed of a curator.

How does this work relate to your career goals and future plans?

I’ve been wanting to have a career in museums and I’m happy to report that the Contemporary Art department at FAMSF recently hired me as their new Assistant Curator!

What were some of the most memorable moments of your fellowship?

Opening up Isaac Julien’s archival material when the boxes arrived from the studio in London, and discovering the artist’s notes, personal photographs, scripts, sketches, and other ephemera that he has collected over the years is something I will always remember.

Seeing the Isaac Julien: I Dream a World exhibition come together after working on it and visualizing it exclusively through imagination for almost a year was such a tremendous experience. I particularly love the room dedicated to Julien’s installation Once Again… Statues Never Die, where art and exhibition design work together very nicely to create an immersive experience for the viewer.

What advice would you give to PhD students (and others!) who are interested in opportunities like these? 

Try to get as much work experience in museums as you can! I started working in museums almost ten years ago, as an intern, later as a fellow–in the summers, during the school year, whenever an opportunity would become available. Go see exhibitions, make and maintain connections in the art world, visit contemporary art fairs if applicable to your interests…

Banner Image: Isaac Julien, Fantôme Afrique, 2005. Three-screen installation. Installation view, de Young museum, 2025. Photograph by Axelle Toussaint.