Director / Curator, Museum of Fantasy
The Institution
Museum of Fantasy (working title) is the exhibition and collecting arm of Dungeon Arts, a New York 501(c)(3). The idea is a cultural institution for tabletop gaming, speculative fiction, and the things around them: RPGs, TCGs, zines, fantasy art, occult literature, underground publishing, worldbuilding.
Four things it does, in order of priority:
- Preserve. The first generation of tabletop RPG players, the people who were there for original D&D, AD&D, Traveller, are in their 60s and 70s. When they pass, families throw out boxes of modules, zines, hand-drawn maps, convention programs. Nobody is systematically collecting any of it.
- Exhibit. Fantasy art, game design as visual work, zine culture, indie publishing. All of it is exhibitable, none of it is being exhibited with any curatorial seriousness.
- Gather. Public programming. D&D nights, book clubs, miniature painting, author readings, workshops.
- Sell. A bookstore operates inside the institution as a retail concession, the way the Met Store or MoMA Design Store sit inside their museums.
Precedents we’re thinking about: the Noguchi Museum (an artist founded it around his own collection in a cheap industrial building), the City Reliquary (if you call something a museum, it is one), and the Museum of Jurassic Technology (irreplaceability as a survival strategy).
Where we are now: Script Wizards LLC runs Dungeon Books today. We’re targeting Q2 2026 for the Dungeon Arts 501(c)(3). Carrie Vu leads the nonprofit. The current lease runs through July 2027; after that we move into a larger space with room for gallery, archive, retail, and programming.
The Role
Third board director, with a curatorial portfolio. The IRS requires an independent board majority, so this seat carries governance weight too.
What you’d own:
- Curatorial direction. Exhibitions, acquisitions, the shape of the permanent collection as it comes together.
- Artist relationships. Living illustrators, estates, collectors, galleries.
- Standards. Conservation, cataloging, exhibition design, wall text.
- A bridge to the fine-arts world. Peer institutions, museum-studies programs, grantmakers who respond to curatorial seriousness.
What we want is someone who can help us treat this tradition the way it deserves, while the people who made it are still around to talk to.
Curatorial Scope
A rough map of what we collect, exhibit, and contextualize. Think of it as a sense of the terrain rather than a checklist.
Pulp, paperback, and Golden Age illustration
Frank Frazetta. Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell. The Brothers Hildebrandt. Michael Whelan. Jim Burns. Roger Dean. Stephen Hickman. Wayne Barlowe. Earlier work by Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, John Bauer, Maxfield Parrish, and Alphonse Mucha, which pulp ended up inheriting.
D&D, TSR, and RPG illustration
Erol Otus, Dave Trampier, David C. Sutherland III, Jeff Dee (TSR origin generation). Larry Elmore, Jeff Easley, Clyde Caldwell, Keith Parkinson (the 80s house style that defined how fantasy looked to a generation). Tony DiTerlizzi (Planescape). Brian Froud (Faeries, Labyrinth). Wayne Reynolds (3e, 4e). Tyler Jacobson (5e covers). Adjacent to all of this: zines and small-press art from the OSR revival, and hand-drawn dungeon cartography as a folk-art tradition.
Magic: The Gathering
MTG has been commissioning fantasy illustration continuously for over 30 years, across thousands of artists. It’s probably the deepest working archive of the form. Foundational names: John Avon (Black British, basically defined what an MTG land looks like), Rebecca Guay, Donato Giancola, Christopher Rush. Contemporary artists we’d want in conversation with the institution, with particular attention to artists of color:
- Karla Ortiz (Puerto Rican). MTG, Marvel concept art, lead plaintiff in the artist class action against generative-AI image models.
- Tran Nguyen (Vietnamese-American). MTG, Folio Society Lord of the Rings, gallery practice.
- Kekai Kotaki (Native Hawaiian). Guild Wars, MTG, dragons.
- John Picacio (Mexican-American). Multiple Hugos, Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire calendar, Lotería deck.
- Stephan Martiniere (Cuban-French). Sci-fi and fantasy covers across most of the major imprints.
- Sana Takeda (Japanese). Monstress.
- Yuko Shimizu (Japanese). The Unwritten, editorial illustration.
- Victo Ngai (Hong Kong-born). Book covers, NYT.
- Yoshitaka Amano (Japanese). Final Fantasy, Vampire Hunter D. Part of the canon Western institutions tend to skip.
- Brian Valeza (Filipino), Bayard Wu and Zezhou Chen (Chinese), Lie Setiawan (Indonesian), Wesley Burt, Daarken / Mike Lim (Asian-American, art director). A whole cohort of MTG-era illustrators doing work that deserves to be looked at together.
- Goñi Montes (Puerto Rican), Stephanie Pui-Mun Law (Chinese-American), Audrey Benjaminsen (Filipina). Adjacent practices worth including.
Contemporary SFF covers and illustration
Tommy Arnold (Sanderson covers). Marc Simonetti (Discworld). Charles Vess (Gaiman, Tolkien). Sam Weber. Greg Manchess. Donato Giancola’s Tolkien work. Annie Stegg and Justin Gerard (Gallery Gerard, Wizards, Disney, HarperCollins), already in our network through Haleigh Ciel.
Adjacent things we care about
Afrofuturism in cover art and game illustration. Indigenous futurisms. Asian speculative-fiction visual traditions. Zines and underground publishing as the folk-art layer of the genre. Convention ephemera: programs, badges, hand-painted booth signage. Material worth preserving before it ends up in a dumpster.
You don’t need to know every name on this list. It’s here so you can see that there’s a real canon, and that most of it is uncurated.
What’s Already Happened
- Mattingly exhibition at our grand opening (JCAST 2024). Animorphs covers in print. Councilman Frank Gilmore, Councilman James Solomon, and NJ Senator Angela McKnight came. Mattingly sent additional work personally. Vintage Brothers Hildebrandt prints also on display.
- Ongoing display of original work by Jersey City artists Jonah Dunstan and Tom Gambino.
- Author programming over the past year: Cassandra Khaw, Saline Goldberg, Alice Evelyn Yang, Jade Song, Julie C. Dao, Gabrielle Nguyen, JE Harter, Sebastien de Castell, Elaine Cho.
- Press in NJ.com / Jersey Journal and JCity Times.
- A line into the museum world via MAD (NYC), Cavegirl Productions (Igniting the Spark, Best Documentary at Gen Con Film Festival 2025), and Gallery Gerard.
- Seed archive. Panat’s personal collection of first-generation RPG material, zines, and fantasy art, ready to catalog.
Year One
- Help shape the curatorial program for the next space: a main exhibition slot, a rotating focus, permanent archive access.
- Set up acquisition and cataloging standards for the seed archive.
- Open conversations with two or three living artists about a near-term show.
- Sit on the board through 501(c)(3) incorporation and the first grant cycle (NJ State Council on the Arts, NJ Cultural Trust, Hudson County LAP).
- Help us bring in additional curatorial advisors as the program grows.
Contact
Carrie Vu (nonprofit lead) and Panat Taranat (founder, Script Wizards LLC). Dungeon Books, 115 Brunswick St, Jersey City, NJ.