Select Upcoming Art Talks, Symposiums in 2018 (February through April)

Bentonville, Arkansas
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
Symposium 2018: Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power

 Benny Andrews, Did the Bear Sit Under a Tree, 1969,
copyright Estate of Benny Andrews.

"The symposium features exhibition artists and curators who will provide an insightful round of conversation reflecting on art, politics, music, and community in the age of Black Power."  The symposium is sold out. However, you can view the livestream  on you device. Check back on February 3rd for the livestream link.

Date: Saturday, February 3, 2018
Time: 10:00 a.m. - 5:30 p.m. 

Cambridge, Massachusetts
Hutchins Center  for African  and African American Research
Black Portraiture[s] IV: The Color of Silence

Black Portraiture[s] IV: The Color of Silence takes place fifteen years after an initial colloquium was convened at Harvard University on African American art. This is "the eighth conference in a series of conversations about imaging the black body. Artists, activists, and scholars are invited to reflect on the visual expressions of national imaginaries and political ideologies that negate racial differences and render black subjects invisible."

Date: Thurs., March 22, 2018 | Fri., March 23, 2018 | Sat., March 24, 2018

Time: 6:00 p.m. | 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. | 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.

Location: Harvard Art Museums | TBA | Harvard Art Museums

Claremont, California
Pomona College Museum of Art
Talk with Curator Lisa Henry 

Mickalene Thomas, Le leçon d'amour, 2008, C-print, 47.5" x 59.
Copyright Mickalene Thomas. Courtesy the artist;
Lehamann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong; and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Independent curator Lisa Henry will discuss the power of social media to reimagine and recontextualize historic narratives. Henry will debut her Instagram photo essay of images of her mother, one of the first black models in the US. This talk is a related event accompanying the currrent exhibitions, MUSE: Mickalene Thomas Photographs and tête-à-tête which are on view January 25 through May 13, 2018. 

Date: Thursday, April 26, 2018

Time: 4:15 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.

College Park, Maryland
David C. Driskell Center
Artist Talk: Amy Sherald

Amy Sherald

This event is presented at the David C. Driskell Center in collaboration with The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. and the University of Maryland's Department of Art. "Through her portraits, Amy Sherald explores the ways people construct and perform their identities in response to political, social, and cultural expectations, offering a critical view of African American cultural history and the representation of the African American body."

Date: Thursday, March 29, 2018

Time: 6:30 p.m.

College Park, Maryland
David C. Driskell Center
Seventeenth  Annual Distinguished Lecture in the Visual Arts
in Honor of David C. Driskell Series
Speaker: David R. Brigham, PhD.

David R. Brigham is President and CEO of Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA). "His talk addresses arts and education, training artists for the 21st century, strategies for impacting and diversifying the canon, changing the face of museums, and diversity's centrality to the mission of our nation's arts institutions."  

Date: April 5, 2018

Time: 6:00 p.m.

Columbus, Ohio
Columbus Museum of Art
Artist Talk: Carrie Mae Weems

Carrie Mae Weems, from Family Pictures and Stories, 1981-82.
Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

This is a related program for the exhibition, Family Pictures, that is on view February 16 through May 20, 2018 at the Columbus Museum of Art.

Date: April 5, 2018

Time: 4:30 p.m.

Location: Wexner Center for the Arts at the Ohio State University

Columbus, Ohio
Columbus Museum of Art
Artist Talk: Deana Lawson 

Deana Lawson, Mohawk Correctional Facility: Jazmin and Family, 2013. Pigment Print.
Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio: Museum Purchase with funds provided by
The Contemporaries.

This is a related program for the exhibition, Family Pictures, that is on view February 16 through May 20, 2018 at the Columbus Museum of Art.

Date: May 17, 2018

Time: 6:00 p.m.

Location: Columbus Museum of Art

Kalamazoo, Michigan
Kalamazoo Institute of Arts (KIA)
Artist Talk: James Van Der Zee's Harlem  

"Richard Koenig, Professor of Art at Kalamazoo College, will explore the work of James Van Der Zee, a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance, who broke the barriers with his photographs of black New Yorkers. Koenig will discuss Van Der Zee in relation to photographer Dawoud Bey's work, currently on view in Harlem, USA and Harlem Redux, along with a selection of Van Der Zee's work. Harlem, USA and Harlem Redux will be on view at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts through April 11, 2018.  

Date: Thursday, February 22, 2018

Time: 6:30 p.m.

Kalamazoo Institute of Arts (KIA)
Book Discussion: South of Pico: African American Artists
in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s

The discussion will be led by Jo Ann Mundi at the KIA Library. South of Pico "is an exploration into how the artists in Los Angeles' black communities during the 1960s and 1970s created a vibrant, productive, and engaged activist arts scene in the face of structural racism."  

When: Wednesday, February 21, 2018

Time: 2:00 p.m.

Location: KIA Library 

Los Angeles, California

University of Southern California (USC)

Fisher Museum of Art 

Senga Nengudi: Improvisational Gestures

Senga Nengudi, R.S.V.P., 1977, sculpture activated by Maren Hassinger,
dimensions variable. Photo Credit: Herman Outlaw.

Symposium
April 14, 2018 

USC Fisher Museum of Art will present a day-long symposium that was inspired by the exhibition Senga Nengudi: Improvisational Gestures, currently on view at the museum through April 14, 2018. This symposium is a collaboration between the USC Fisher Museum with the California African American Museum, USC Roski School of Art and Design, and USC Dornsife's Department of Art History."The symposium will offer both new and familiar audiences an opportunity to explore and experience the work of Senga Nengudi, as well as investigate its intersections in contemporary art and performance. Panels, screenings, and a performance will bring together artists, students, activists, curators, writers, and intellectuals for a day of dialogue and discovery."

Stanford, California

Stanford University

Cantor Arts Center, Auditorium

Art Practice Talk Series: Jonathan Calm

Jonathan Calm

The upcoming speaker in the Art Talk Practice Series, Jonathan Calm, is a visual artist and assistant professor in Photography at the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. Calm's "interests include urban architecture and housing and he is currently developing new work around the representation of African-American automobility, featuring performance, reenactment and portraiture to evoke the tension between moving and still images and bodies.

This lecture, African-American Automobility: The Dangerous Freedom of the Open Road, shares the same title as the exhibition that Calm has on view at the Stanford Art Gallery through March 18, 2018. 

When: Thursday, March 8, 2018
Time: 6:00 - 7:00 p.m.
Location: Cantor Arts Center, Auditorium 

Syracuse, New York

Everson Museum of Art

Film Screening /Talk: AfriCOBRA: Art for the People

Everson Museum of Art features a film screening of AfriCOBRA: Art for the People and a talk with AfriCOBRA artist Napoleon  Jones-Henderson. "This poignant documentary  features rare interviews and the dynamic work of Chicago's AfriCOBRA artists and founder Jeff Donaldson. There will be a conversation with AfriCOBRA artist and scholar Napoleon Jones-Henderson as he discusses  the contributions of AfriCOBRA to the 1960s Black Arts Movement." The talk will follow the film screening.

Date; February 22, 2018

Time: 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.

Location: Homer Auditorium

Washington, D.C.

National Gallery of Art

Public Symposia: Boundary Trouble: 

The Self-Taught Artist and American Avant-Gardes

     Horace Pippin, Interior, 1944, oil on canvas overall: 24 1/8" x 30 3/16"x 1/16 " 

framed: 32" x 38 1/2" x 2 5/8" 

National Gallery of Art, Washington. 

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Meyer P. Potamkin, 

in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art

This program is held on the occasion of the exhibition Outliers and American Vanguard Art. Papers will explore subjects including religion, gender, and cross-disciplinary art practices, which are central to the intersection of American mainstream art with the work of an eclectic range of self-taught artists."  View the program.

Date: February 16, 2018  | February 17, 2018 

Time: 2:00 to 5:00 p.m. | 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Location: East Building Auditorium

West Palm Beach, Florida

Norton Museum of Art

Curator's Talk: Cheryl Brutvan

Jean-Michel Basquiat: Drawing into Painting

Cheryl Brutvan discusses Basquiat and his emphasis on drawing throughout his career as in the work on view at the Norton Museum of Art. Jean-Michel Basquiat: Drawing into Painting is on view

February 8 through March 18. 2018. 

Date: February 8, 2018

Time: 6:30 p.m. 

SELECT ART TALKS: Fall/Winter 2016

Coral Gables, Florida

Lowe Art Museum, University of Miami

  Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons (Cuban, b. 1959)
Voyeurs and Beholders of..., 2008

Composition 1/15, Polaroid, 20" x 24" 

 Collection of the artist © Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons

The Lowe Art Museum will host The Arnold and Augusta Newman Lecture Series in Photography. The Series invites distinguished photographers to the University of Miami to discuss their work. The upcoming guest speaker, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, will discuss her work on October 13, 2016. DETAILS 

Durham, North Carolina

Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University

Hank Willis Thomas, a prolific conceptual artist, will deliver the Annual Barbra and Andrew Rothschild Lecture on November 3, 2016. Thomas' talk is entitled, For Freedoms. DETAILS

Harlem, New York

Studio Museum in Harlem

 

Jordan Casteel Charles, 2016, Oil on canvas, 78" × 60", Courtesy the artist
Photo: Adam Reich

The Artist's Voice: Jordan Casteel

October 20, 2016 |7 - 9 p.m.

"On the occasion of Tenses: Artists in Residence 2015–16, join artist in residence Jordan Casteel; Rujeko Hockley, Assistant Curator at the Brooklyn Museum; and Dr. Monica Miller, Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies at Barnard College, as they explore the complexly layered site specificity of Harlem."  DETAILS

Harrisburg, Pennsylvania 

Susquehanna Art Museum

Radcliffe Bailey, Until I Die/Georgia Trees and the Upper Room, 1997, color aquatint.

 Prof. Curlee Raven Holton, Executive Director, David C. Driskell Center will deliver a lecture in the main gallery of the Susquehanna Art Museum on November 5, 2016. Prof. Holton's lecture will focus on the current exhibition, African American Art Since 1950: Perspectives from the David C. Driskell Center which is on view October 7, 2016 through January 22, 2017. DETAILS

Los Angeles, California

University of Southern California,

Roski School of Art and Design 

"The USC Roski School of Art and Design presents the Roski Talks lecture series featuring weekly, in-depth presentations on contemporary art & art criticism by visiting artists, curators, theorists, art historians, writers, organizers, activists, and other cultural producers who engage in critical, open, and rigorous conversations with graduate students and members of the community." 

Julie Mehretu | Painter, New York, Berlin
In dialogue with Professor Steven Nelson, UCLA, a specialist on her work.
October 13, 2016, 7 - 9p.m. | Broad Museum | 221 S. Grand Avenue, 90012
Co-presented with the Broad Museum. DETAILS

Naima Keith | Deputy Director, Exhibitions and Programs, CA African American Musuem
Lecture: Museum Responses to Current Events
November 7, 6 - 8p.m. | Graduate Fine Arts Building (IFT)
DETAILS

Montclair, New Jersey

Montclair Art Museum (MAM)

Janet Taylor Pickett, Observing Bounty and Promise, 2013, collage of various papers on canvas. Courtesy of Imlay Gallery and the artist. Photo by Christine Gatti. The work draws from Romare Bearden's Circe for its central figure.

30th Annual Julia Norton Babson Memorial Lecture
A Private Conversation Made Public
Thursday, October 13, 2016, 7 p.m.

Artist Janet Taylor Pickett, MAM’s chief curator Gail Stavitsky, and independent curator Kathy Imlay of Imlay Gallery will discuss Janet’s unique fusion of imagery, process, and inspiration in her current MAM exhibition, Janet Taylor Pickett: The Matisse Series. This exhibition "explores the dialogue between Taylor Pickett’s artwork and that of renowned French artist Henri Matisse. Held in the Museum’s Roberts and Rotunda galleries, the exhibition features 76 collages, as well as 4 hand-made books." The exhibition ends June 18, 2017.

New Haven, Connecticut
Yale University Art Gallery

Gallery Talk: Branden Jacobs-Jenkins on Titus Kaphar

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, winner of the 2016 Donald Windham–Sandy Campbell Literature Prize for drama, examines the work of New Haven–based artist Titus Kaphar, M.F.A. 2006. Jacobs-Jenkins discusses what he sees in the work and outlines the ways that Kaphar’s concerns dovetail with those he addresses in his plays.The gallery talk will be held on September 21, 2016, 12:30 pm.

Newark, New Jersey

Newark Museum  

Symposium: Modern Heroics: Revisiting African-American Art at the Newark Museum

The one-day symposium is being held in conjunction with the exhibition currently on view, Modern Heroics: 75 Years of African-American Expressionism which is drawn largely from Newark’s permanent collections of African-American art and folk/self-taught collections. The symposium is held on October 15, 2016. DETAILS.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Woodmere Art Museum 

Easter, 1951. (John W. Mosley Photograph Collection, Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection, Temple University Libraries)

Lecture: Diane D. Turner, Black Philadelphia and the Spirit of Unity: Art and Culture

Diane D. Turner, PhD, curator, Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection, Temple University will speak on October 15, 2016. Her focus will be on Black Philadelphia and the Spirit of Unity: Art and Culture. Turner will illustrate how Mosley’s images chronicled a spirit of known and little-known individuals and art and cultural organizations and institutions. This lecture is an accompanying program for the exhibition, A Million Faces: The Photography of John W. Mosley, on view September 24, 2016 through January 16, 2017. SERIES of SUPPORTING TALKS

Washington, D.C.

National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA)

Alison Saar, Tango, 2005; Woodcut on paper, 25¾" x 38¾", Courtesy of the artist and L.A. Louver; © Alison Saar

Gallery Talk: Alison Saar in Print

NMWA Curatorial Assistant Stephanie Midon discusses several works in the special exhibition Alison Saar In Print on September 28, 2016. DETAILS

Select African American Art Exhibitions: Fall Highlights for 2013

This highlight features a few exhibitions that are either opening or will still be on view in the the fall of 2013. Presenting the exhibitions as they approach their opening dates or shortly after opening, assures a freshness and currency of information for visual art enthusiasts. A number of important traveling exhibitions that opened earlier in the year are still being featured across the country and are accessible from the Blog page entitled: Select Art Exhibitions in 2013. This page is updated on a weekly basis by either adding newly discovered exhibitions or removing those that are approaching their expiration date. Its intent is to provide comprehensive coverage of current ongoing exhibitions on view for the current quarter of the year.

Black Art Project (BAP) welcomes any information or leads that you might have relating to Black art exhibitions, particularly regional exhibitions that are not traditionally marketed on a national scale. BAP will verify the accuracy of any information submitted. Thank you for any assistance that you provide.

Brooklyn, New York

Brooklyn Museum

Wangechi Mutu (Kenyan, b. 1972). Riding Death in My Sleep, 2002. Ink and collage on paper, 60" x 44". Collection of Peter Norton, New York. © Wangechi Mutu

Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey will be on view in the Elizabeth Sackler

Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum from October 11, 2013 through

March 9, 2014. This is Wangechi Mutu’s first survey in the United States; it is

the most comprehensive and innovative show yet for this internationally renowned, multidisciplinary artist.

More than 50 works from the mid-1990s to the present, including collage, drawing, sculpture, installation and video are featured in Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey. The exhibition features many of the artist’s most iconic collages drawn from major international collections, rarely seen early works and new creations. 

A richly illustrated, full-color catalogue accompanies the exhibition Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey.

College Park, Maryland

University of Maryland

The David C. Driskell Center

Alison Saar, Weight, 2012, Fiberglass, wood, rope, cotton scale and miscellaneous objects, 80"x 65"x 24".
© Alison Saar, 2013. Image courtesy of LA Louver Gallery, Venice, CA.

Alison Saar: STILL..., a collection of 11 sculptures created by artist Alison Saar, includes works from 2010 to 2012 and combines the ruggedness of nature with solid structure; the exhibition includes four never-exhibited works and six new pieces. Alison Saar: STILL... will be on view at the David Driskell Center from September 12 through December 13, 2013.

Alison Saar’s work is deeply tied to her multiracial heritage, and it is through this lens which she so strikingly captures the human spirit. Through her sculptures, she displays the primal intensity of people underlying the civility of everyday life. Saar scrutinizes bigotry and historical burdens and portrays these concepts through a visual and kinesthetic tension, such as in the powerful piece titled Weight that shows a young black girl on a swing, weighed down with shackles, a lock and key, boxing gloves and other assorted items on a cotton scale. "Combining African art and ritual, Greek mythology, and German aspects of expressionism, Saar challenges stereotypes and offers an indictment of human discrimination." SEE more images from Alison Saar: STILL....

A catalogue accompanies this exhibition.

  Ithaca, New York

 Cornell University

 Johnson Museum of Art

Laylah Ali, Untitled, 2000, gouache and pencil on paper, Collection of Susan Greenberg Minster. Photo courtesy of the artist

Johnson Museum of Art presents Laylah Ali: The Greenheads Series. The exhibition will be on view September 14 through December 22, 2013. The Greenheads series - created between 1996 and 2005- will be shown as a comprehensive body of work. Over forty of these gouache paintings from a total of more than eighty have been gathered from collections to chronicle the series' development.

Laylah Ali: The Greenheads Series "chronicle the development of her dramatis personae—thin, round-headed two-dimensional beings of indeterminate sex and race—who anticipate, respond to, or enact unseen power struggles." The exhibition will allow viewers to examine the evolution of Ali’s series.

Madison, Wisconsin

University of Wisconsin–Madison Campus

Chazen Museum of Art

Romare Bearden (1912–1988), Cattle of the Sun God, 1977, collage, © Romare Bearden Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York. Courtesy Ann and Sheldon Vogel

Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey, featuring approximately 50 works, will be on view through November 24, 2013 at the Chazen Museum of Art. The museum will also organize extensive educational and community programming in conjunction with the exhibition. "In 1977, Romare Bearden created a series of collages and watercolors based on Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey. Rich in symbolism and allegorical content, Bearden’s Odyssey series bridged classical mythology and African American culture. The series conveyed timelessness and the universality of the human condition, but was displayed for only two months in New York City before the works went to private collections and public art museums."

Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey is organized by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service in cooperation with the Romare Bearden Foundation and Estate and DC Moore Gallery. It was curated by English and jazz scholar Robert G. O’Meally, the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature and founder and former director of the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University. 

SEE exhibition related programs. A catalogue accompanies this exhibition.

 
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Barbara Chase-Riboud, American, born 1939, All That Rises Must Converge / Red, 2008. Red bronze, silk, cotton, and synthetic fibers, 74 1/2" x 42" x 28", Base: 23 1/2" x 17 5/8". Courtesy of the Artist.

Barbara Chase-Riboud: The Malcolm X Steles will be on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from September 14, 2013 through January 20, 2014. The exhibition will bring together more than forty works from the United States and Europe that examine Barbara Chase-Riboud’s artistic career, focusing primarily on her important Malcolm X sculptures. See this exhibition in the following galleries: 172, 173, Alter Gallery 176, and Great Stair Hall.

Chase-Riboud’s sculptures dedicated to Malcolm X have been likened to contemporary interpretations of the steles erected in various parts of the ancient world to commemorate important people and events. Cast from cut and folded sheets of wax, the sculptures combine bronze, manipulated into undulating folds and crevices, with knotted and braided silk and wool fiber. 

The artist developed the first four sculptures in this series in 1969, inspired by the civil rights movement and her political and personal experiences living in France and traveling to North Africa, China, and the Soviet Union. Chase-Riboud returned to the series in 2003 and again in 2007–8, creating a total of nine additional works. Reconciling vertical and horizontal, mineral and organic, light and dark, the artist has forged in the Malcolm X steles powerful beacons dedicated to the possibility of cultural integration.

There is a catalogue, Barbara Chase-Riboud: The Malcolm X Steles, offering insightful assessments of the works in the exhibition and includes the artist's reflections in her own voice on her oeuvre. 

 Sacramento, California
Crocker Art Museum

 

Kara Walker, Untitled (Scene #5 from Emancipation Approximation portfolio), 1999–2000. Screenprint on paper, (7/20),   44" x 34".

Emancipating the Past: Kara Walker's Tales of Slavery and Power will be on view September 22, 2013 through January 5, 2014 at the Crocker Art Museum. 

Featuring 60 objects from the collection of the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, the exhibition demonstrates the artistic approach Walker takes to subject matter, historical narrative, and the complexities and ambiguities of racial and historical representation. To make her pursuit compelling, Walker radically reinvented the 19th-century silhouette portrait, elevating the practice of tracing onto and cutting out black paper figures into a formidable, grand format for her "nightmarish fictions."  

The graphic nature of the artist's work, both in content and format, moves from the wall to moving picture in this presentation of silhouettes, drawings, prints, and video. As race remains one of the most difficult conversations to have in America, this exhibition is especially timely amid the discourse on race today, 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation. 

St. Louis, Missouri

Washington University in St. Louis

Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum

        

Rashid Johnson, Self Portrait Laying on Jack Johnson's Grave, 2006.

Rashid Johnson: Message to Our Folks is the first major solo museum exhibition to survey the career of this Chicago-born, New York-based artist. Featured in the Kemper Museum's Ebsworth Gallery, the exhibition will be on view September 20, 2013 - January 6, 2014.  Message to Our Folks, titled after a 1969 album by avant-garde jazz collective Art Ensemble of Chicago, the exhibition examines how Johnson's work has developed over the first fourteen years of his career.

"Johnson incorporates commonplace objects from his childhood into his work in a process he describes as hijacking the domestic. He transforms these materials—plants, books, record albums, photographs, shea butter, soap—into conceptually loaded and visually compelling art that investigates the construction of identity. Steeped in individual experience while invoking shared cultural references, Johnson's work also calls upon black American creative and intellectual figures, extending the legacy of these cultural icons."

A fully illustrated catalog, the most comprehensive documentation of Johnson’s work to date, accompanies the exhibition.  

Venice, California 

L A Louver Gallery 

Alison, Saar, The Cotton Eater study (sugar sack shroud series), 2013
found sugar sacks, gesso, charcoal and graphite, 81" x 37". Image courtesy L.A. Louver, Venice, CA.

Alison Saar: Slough, featuring new sculptures and drawings created in 2013, will be on view at L A Louver Gallery from September 3 through October 5, 2013. The title of the exhibition, Slough, is defined as "a situation characterized by lack of progress," or "to cast off or shed dead skin." It is this duality of meaning, and a sense of both impasse and renewal, that pervades the 15 new works in the exhibition.

The Cotton Eater Study (sugar sack shroud series) is a large drawing measuring 81 x 37 inches rendered with charcoal and graphite on found cotton sugar sacks. This and other drawings on cotton panels from the sugar sack shroud series are on view in the exhibition. Another of those drawings, Backwater Blues, "which Saar created in New Orleans during her fellowship at the Joan Mitchell Foundation in April 2013. Dismayed by the lack of progress following the tragedy of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, Backwater Blues illustrates a woman clothed in a sheer slip gazing back as water rises above her ankles. Framed by a found screen door, the drawing sheds light on the media’s voyeuristic coverage of the devastation  following the hurricane, where footage of victims often disheveled and undressed, were broadcast without any regard for their dignity."