Art History From Home: Collective Memory in Contemporary Black Art

Online, via Zoom

This series of online talks by the Whitney’s Joan Tisch Teaching Fellows highlights works in the Museum's collection to illuminate critical topics in American art from 1900 to the present. During each thirty-minute session, participants are invited to comment and ask questions through a moderated chat.

This session looks at the ways contemporary Black artists draw on collective memory to play with, challenge, and transform notions of identity. We will consider several recent exhibitions and performances at the Whitney including projects by Kevin Beasley and Jason Moran, as well as works from the collection by Cauleen Smith, Ja’Tovia Gary, and Tomashi Jackson. We will explore how these artists subvert the canon of American art and culture.

Ayanna Dozier is an artist, lecturer, curator, and PhD Candidate at McGill University. Her dissertation, Mnemonic Aberrations, examines the formal and narrative aesthetics in Black feminist experimental short films in the United Kingdom and the United States. She is the author of the forthcoming 33 1/3 book on Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope. She is currently a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney and a lecturer in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University.

Free with registration.