Moderated by Lucy Gallun, Assistant Curator, Department of
Photography, MoMA
Friday, April 4, 2014
7:00 pm program
| 8:15 pm reception
Doors open at 6:45 pm
The Celeste Bartos
Theater (Theater 3)
The Lewis B. and
Dorothy Cullman Education and Research Building
4 West 54th
Street
New York, NY
General Admission tickets ($35), Member Tickets ($20) may be
purchased at The Museum information and film desks, online at MoMA.org,
or through the Friends of Education Office.
All tickets will be held at the door.
Presented by The
Friends of Education of The Museum of Modern Art as part of the series
Conversations: Among Friends, this evening's program features a conversation
between artists Deana Lawson and Lyle Ashton Harris, and scholar and
author Salamishah Tillet, moderated by Lucy Gallun, Assistant Curator,
Department of Photography, MoMA. Following the program, guests are invited to
continue the conversation and meet the participants at an intimate reception
catered by Fantasy Fare in The Cullman Mezzanine.
For more than two
decades Lyle Ashton Harris has cultivated a diverse artistic
practice including photographic media, collage, installation, and performance.
His work explores intersections between the personal and the political,
examining the impact of ethnicity, gender, and desire on contemporary social
and cultural dynamics. Known for his self-portraits and use of pop culture
icons (such as Billie Holiday and Michael Jackson), Harris teases the viewers’
perceptions and expectations, signifying cultural cursors, and recalibrating
the familiar with the extraordinary. His work has been exhibited
internationally, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon
R. Guggenheim Museum, and the 52nd Venice Biennale. His work has been acquired
by major international museums, most recently by The Museum of Modern Art in
New York. His commissioned work has been featured in a wide range of
publications, including The New York Times Magazine and
the New Yorker. In 2014 Harris joined the board of trustees of
the American Academy in Rome. Born in New York City, Harris spent his
formative years in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. He received his bachelor of arts
with honors from Wesleyan University in 1988, and his masters in fine arts from
the California Institute of the Arts in 1990. He currently lives and works
in New York City and is an associate professor at New York University.
Deana Lawson is a photography-based artist born in Rochester,
NY. She received her MFA in photography from Rhode Island School of Design in
2004, and currently teaches photography at Princeton University. Her work
examines the body’s ability to channel personal and social histories, addressing
themes of familial legacy, community, romance, and religious/spiritual
aesthetics. Her practice borrows from simultaneous visual traditions, including
photographic and figurative portraiture, social documentary aesthetics, and
vernacular family-album photographs. Lawson is visually inspired by the
materiality of black culture and its expression as seen through the body and in
domestic environments. Lace curtains, artificial nails, blemished skin, colored
weave, and plastic couch covers are examples of visual material that Lawson
identifies and heightens in her pictures. Careful attention is given to
lighting and pose, both formal constructs used to transform, inform, and
intensify representations of power and liberation through personal and intimate
space. Lawson meets her subjects in everyday walks of life: grocery stores;
subway trains; busy avenues in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn; road trips taken to the deep
south; and travel abroad to the West Indies and beyond. Exhibitions include
Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia;
MoMA, New York; MoMA PS1, Long Island City, New York; Helene Bailly Gallery,
Paris; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Kunst im Tunnel in Düsseldorf,
Germany; Light Work, Syracuse, New York; Cohan & Leslie, New York; Collette
Blanchard Gallery, New York; Artists Space, New York; The Print Center,
Philadelphia; and Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta. Lawson is the
recipient of the Art Matters Grant, John Gutmann Photography Fellowship, Rema
Hort Mann Foundation Grant, Aaron Siskind Fellowship Grant, and a NYFA Grant.
Her work has been published in the New Yorker, The
Collector's Guide to New Art Photography Vol. 2, Time Out New York,
Contact Sheet #154, and PQ Journal for Contemporary
Photography Volume 24. Lawson has participated in residencies
including Workspace Residency at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in New York;
Light Work in Syracuse, New York; and Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, NY
As a rape
survivor, scholar, and writer, Dr. Salamishah Tillet has spent
her career championing the rights and voices of our most vulnerable citizens.
Nominated by Glamour magazine as a “Women of the Year,” named
as one of the “Top 50 Global Leaders Ending Violence Against Children” by the
Together for Girls’ Safe magazine, and America’s “Top Leaders
Under 30” by Ebony, she has appeared on the BBC, CNN,
MSNBC, and NPR, written for The Chicago Tribune,
The Guardian, and The Root, and guest blogs
for The Nation. Currently, she is an associate professor of
English at the University of Pennsylvania and has faculty appointments in the
departments of Africana studies, and gender, sexuality, and women’s
studies. In 2003, Tillet and her sister, Scheherazade Tillet, co-founded A
Long Walk Home, Inc., a non-profit that uses art therapy and the visual and
performing arts to end violence against all girls and women. Tillet was also an
associate producer of
Aishah Shahidah Simmons’s groundbreaking NO! The Rape Documentary, and
was featured in the award-winning Rape Is... by Cambridge
Documentary Films. She is the author of Sites of Slavery: Citizenship
and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination (Duke
University Press, 2012). In 2011, she wrote the liner notes for the three-time
Grammy-award winning album Wake Up! by John Legend and The
Roots. In 2013, she published Gloria Steinem: The Kindle Singles
Interview with Amazon, and she is currently working on a book on the
Civil Rights icon, Nina Simone. She earned her PhD in the history
of American civilization and AM in English and American literature from Harvard
University, and her MA in teaching from Brown University. She also holds a BA
in English and African American studies from the University of Pennsylvania. In
2010, she was awarded the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Award for Distinguished
Teaching by an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. In
2010–11, she was the recipient of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Fellow for
Career Enhancement and served as a visiting fellow at the Center of African
American Studies at Princeton University. In 2013–14, she was invited to be an
inaugural member of the Project of the Advancement of Our Common Humanity, a
think tank at New York University. She is also a Scholar-in-Residence at the
New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black
Culture.
Lucy Gallun is assistant curator in the Department of
Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, where her upcoming projects include an
exhibition of photographs from the Shunk-Kender Photography Collection, as well
as the next iteration of MoMA’s New Photography exhibition series (both 2015).
At MoMA, Gallun has worked on numerous exhibitions including Staging
Action: Performance in Photography since 1960 (2011); Boris
Mikhailov: Case History (2011); Cindy Sherman (2012); The
Shaping of New Visions: Photography, Film, Photobook (2012–13); A
World of Its Own: Photographic Practices in the Studio (2014);
and Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness (upcoming
2014). Prior to coming to MoMA, she was the Whitney Lauder Curatorial Fellow at
the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, where she curated the
exhibitions Everyday Imaginary (2010) and Erin
Shirreff: Still, Flat, and Far (2010); and she was a Helena Rubinstein
Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program (ISP), where
she co-curated the exhibition Time Out of Joint: Recall and Evocation
in Recent Art, at The Kitchen, New York (2009). Gallun has also served as
associate publisher at Gregory R. Miller & Co. She holds a BA in art
history and urban studies from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.Phil in
art history from the Graduate Center, City University of New York.
No comments:
Post a Comment