After her undergraduate education, Hockley worked as a curatorial assistant as the
Studio Museum in Harlem where she worked for two years alongside Director
Thelma Golden. After her work at the Studio Museum, Hockley moved to
Southeast Asia for a year and a half to teach
English. Once she came back to the states, Hockley applied to graduate art history and curatorial practice programs, attending
UC San Diego from 2009 to 2012. In 2017, Hockley co-curate, with Catherine Morris,
We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85, a show dedicated to female artists of color, and their political and social efforts during
second-wave feminism. In 2015, Hockley made
artnet News’s global list of 25 Women Curators Shaking Things Up and she was among
Culture Magazine’s 10 Young Curators to Watch in 2016. Her first undertaking was to help curate “An Incomplete History of Protest: Selections From the Whitney’s Collection, 1940–2017.” Rujeko Hockley and
Jane Panetta curated the
2019 Whitney Biennial. The selections within the 75 artists in the show included primarily female, minority artists from the two coasts in the United States. When Panetta and Hockley were asked about their choice of including mostly younger minority artists, they discussed the many common threads they found among their choices including college debt struggles, gentrification and real estate issues. Hockley serves on the board of Art Matters and Recess. == References ==