At a time when museums all over the country are trying to increase the number of people of color on its staff, boards and walls, the Guggenheim Museum has hired its first full-time black curator: Ashley James.

Ms. James, who this week started on the job as the museum’s associate curator of contemporary art, was most recently an assistant curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum, where she was a moving force behind the acclaimed exhibition “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power.”

“Her work complements the Guggenheim’s mission to present the art of today,” Nancy Spector, the Guggenheim’s artistic director and chief curator, said in a statement, “which we understand as a deep and expansive view of art history.”

Before coming to the Brooklyn Museum, Ms. James was a Mellon Curatorial Fellow in the Museum of Modern Art’s drawings and prints department, where she focused on retrospectives of the artists Adrian Piper and Charles White. Ms. James has also held positions at the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Yale University Art Gallery. In the spring, she will receive a Ph.D. from Yale in English Literature, African-American Studies, and women’s, gender and sexuality studies.