Reception and Talk:
Art as a Social Force from the 1920s to 1940s

Floor 8

Patron, Circle, Fellow, and Sponsor Members

"The creators of beauty must invest their greatest efforts in the aim of materializing an art valuable to the people… to create something of beauty for all, beauty that enlightens and stirs to struggle."

—Manifesto of the Syndicate of Technical Workers, Painters, and Sculptors, 1922

For the upcoming exhibition Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, 1925–1945, teaching fellow Ayanna Dozier will discuss artists associated with Mexican muralism, the Harlem Renaissance, and the New Deal’s art programs. The conversation will illuminate how artists such as Elizabeth Catlett, Aaron Douglas, José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and others engaged the momentous cultural and political changes of their time. Focusing on this historical period, the talk will consider art’s social potential when it becomes public and collective.

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. Currently a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney and a lecturer in the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, Dozier was also a 2018–2019 Helena Rubinstein Critical Studies Fellow in the Whitney Independent Study Program.

This event is open to Patron, Circle, Fellow, and Sponsor members. The invitation is for two.