As an arts professional, McGrew has extensive experience in leadership, strategic planning, institutional development, administration, management, grant writing, program development, education, and mentorship of college students and professionals. She is a visionary and effective leader experienced in strategic fundraising for museums and high level donor management. Her unique skill set also includes excellent creative problem-solving skills, expertise in managing people, the ability to negotiate complex situations to all parties’ satisfaction, realizing large-scale and innovative projects—including raising funds to support them—within previously determined budgets, and visioning and then realizing the optimal support for the organization’s mission.

McGrew’s broad and deep experience includes serving as President of the Claire Falkenstein Foundation, which cultivates public access to and study of the innovative work of American artist Claire Falkenstein, (1908–97); Senior Director of Institutional Relations at the contemporary art gallery Vielmetter Los Angeles; and curatorial positions at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, Los Angeles.

McGrew is the recipient of a 2023–24 Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellowship with colleagues Manthia Diawara (writer, filmmaker, cultural theorist, and professor of comparative literature and film at New York University) and Terri Geis (associate professor of art and co-director of the MFA program of art and media at New York University Abu Dhabi). Together, the three scholars are conceiving the exhibition and publication Peering into the Abyss: Glissant, Goya, and Contemporary Art. The project examines the deep confluences and inspirations that circulate between the writings of Edouard Glissant, the art of Francisco de Goya, and the work of contemporary artists from Africa, the Arab World, and their diasporas. The exhibition and publication link Caribbean theorist Édouard Glissant’s concept of the Abyss as the darkness of the unknown—the bottom of the ocean where enslaved Africans were thrown overboard during the horrific transatlantic journeys—and Goya’s brutal representations of cruelty and injustice to our vision of the abyss where contemporary artists create humanity out of the most monstrous actions “where the poems of our opacities reside.” In Glissant’s analysis, this space of abject violence can be transformed into a shared humanity.

From 1996 to 2023, McGrew was Senior Curator at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, formerly known as Pomona College Museum of Art. During her tenure, she created a vibrant intellectual hub for contemporary art that creatively responded to pressing aesthetic, social, cultural, and political issues. The academic environment provided an ideal setting for experimental projects backed by research and scholarly engagement.

McGrew’s curatorial vision, creative collaboration, dedication to intellectual inquiry, and commitment to exhibition-making are reflected in the over eighty exhibitions and accompanying publications that she organized, including June Harwood: Paintings (2023); Christina Fernandez: Under the Sun (2022); Each Day Begins with the Sun Rising: Four Artists from Hiroshima (2022); Sadie Barnette: Legacy and Legend (co-curated with Ciara Ennis, 2021); Alison Saar: Of Aether and Earthe (co-curated with Irene Tsatsos, 2020–21); Todd Gray: Euclidean Gris Gris (2019–20); Marcia Hafif: A Place Apart (2018); R.S.V.P. Los Angeles: The Project Series at Pomona (2015); In the Shadow of Numbers: Charles Gaines Selected Works from 1975–2012 (2012); the award-winning and critically acclaimed It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969–1973 (co-curated with Glenn Phillips, 2011–12); Steve Roden: when words become forms (2010); Hunches, Geometrics, Organics: Paintings by Frederick Hammersley (2007); The 21st Century Odyssey Part II: The Performances of Barbara T. Smith (2005); and many others.

In 1999, McGrew founded the Project Series at the museum, with the vision of collaborating directly with emerging and underrepresented Southern California artists. The series brought in artists to engage the college community in experimental actions that animated the conversation among artists, students, faculty, and the local community. McGrew presented fifty-two Projects, all with accompanying artists’ books or catalogs. Artists included Alia Ali, Edgar Arceneaux, Sadie Barnette, Andrea Bowers, Mark Bradford, Sam Falls, Christina Fernandez, Ken Gonzales-Day, Katie Grinnan, Iva Gueorguieva, Evan Holloway, Hayv Kahraman, Soo Jim Kim, Hirokazu Kosaka, Dinh Q. Le, Mark Allen and Machine Project, Amanda Ross-Ho, Shirley Tse, Brenna Youngblood, Liz Young, and Liat Yossifer.

The Project Series expanded on Pomona College’s illustrious history of supporting avant-garde art, which McGrew and co-curator Glenn Phillips explored in It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge of Los Angeles 1969–1973. The extraordinary artistic developments that occurred on the Pomona College campus started when gallery director Hal Glicksman proposed the then-radical idea of working with artists directly by commissioning installations and artists’ projects rather than solely exhibiting discrete art objects. He and his successor, Helene Winer, established a program of supporting young artists who were doing exploratory, innovative projects. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, they presented ground-breaking conceptual, installation, and performance artworks that reflected a confluence at Pomona College of art faculty, curators, visiting artists, and students who would go on to make significant contributions to contemporary art history. It Happened at Pomona was divided into three parts. Part 1 addressed works produced under the museum leadership of Glicksman; Part 2 looked at Winer’s tenure; and Part 3 was devoted to Pomona’s art faculty.

To realize the artistic visions of the twenty-nine artists represented in the year-long project, the curators devoted extraordinary effort and attention to producing complex works that challenge a visitor’s perception and bodily experiences. Some examples of the research process behind It Happened at Pomona include a year of experimenting with different lightbulbs to evaluate the visual qualities of cast light onto different shades of white paint, in order to produce the most historically-accurate presentation of a Robert Irwin disc painting; working with chemists and engineers to devise a means to extend the functional lifespan of Lloyd Hamrol’s 1969 balloon and water installation Situational Construction for Pomona College from twenty-four hours to three months; a two-year-long conversation with Michael Asher about what it would mean to re-create his seminal 1970 architectural intervention at Pomona, a process that led him to develop his final work, a piece in which the museum remained open twenty-four hours a day for seven days a week during the run of the show; working with Judy Chicago to produce her first new pyrotechnic performance since 1974, which led to the work she is making today.

As seen with McGrew’s work on It Happened at Pomona, many of her projects have been collaborations with colleagues who believed in exploring alternative ways of curatorial production, from conception through research, exhibition design, didactics, installation, programs, and publications. Another prime example is R.S.V.P. Los Angeles: The Project Series at Pomona (2015), which McGrew co-curated with Terri Geis, Lisa Anne Auerbach, Jonathan Hal, Valerie Thomas, Ian Byers-Gamber, and Nicolas Orozco-Valdivia. The exhibition and accompanying publication celebrated the milestone of fifty Project Series exhibitions by connecting several artists who had been part of the program with a generative curatorial experiment. Artistic vision was the driving force behind the Project Series, and the collaborative curatorial process of R.S.V.P. Los Angeles prioritized this in a new way. A committee of Pomona College colleagues selected a group of previous Project Series artists and invited them to nominate other, emerging artists to be considered for the thematic group exhibition R.S.V.P.Los Angeles. The curatorial committee then made the final selection. The artists invited to exhibit were Justin Cole, Michael Decker, Naotaka Hiro, Wakana Kimura, Aydinaneth Ortiz, Michael Parker, and Nikki Pressley. The exhibition was envisioned as seven small solo shows, and each artist was invited to present new and/or recent work. The experience of sharing the curatorial process among a team of artists, scholars, designers, and students yielded a revelatory exhibition that highlighted the importance of trusting in artists and their creative visions—true to the spirit of the Project Series.

In addition to the 2023 Warhol Foundation Curatorial Research Fellowship, McGrew, with Irene Tsatsos, received The Fellows of Contemporary Art 2020 Curator’s Award to support the exhibition Alison Saar: Of Aether and Earthe (Fall 2020). McGrew is the recipient of a Getty Curatorial Research Fellowship (2007). She received major Warhol Foundation exhibition grants for Sadie Barnette: Legacy and Legend (2020) and Todd Gray: Euclidean Gris Gris (2018) and Getty Foundation grants under the Pacific Standard Time initiatives in 2009-11 and 2014–16. In 2011, It Happened at Pomona College received the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC) award for Outstanding Exhibition in a University Museum.