Art History from Home:
Collective Memory in Contemporary Black Art

Online, via Zoom

This series of online talks asks the Whitney’s Joan Tisch Teaching Fellows to highlight select 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 for a fifteen-minute Q&A following the talk. Sessions are available live only, but topics and speakers do periodically repeat. Check back here for more sessions added regularly.        

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 works by Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, and Kerry James Marshall to explore how these artists subvert the canon of American art and culture.

Ayanna Dozier is an artist, lecturer, curator, and scholar. She recently completed her Ph.D. in art history and communication studies at McGill University. She is the author of the 33 ⅓ 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.