Study Sessions: Samantha Box, Ted Kerr, and Traci C. West

Floor 3, Education Center

Study Sessions is an ongoing event series inspired by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s notion of study as “what you do with other people.” For each Study Session, an artist, writer, or cultural worker selects a work of art on view in the Whitney’s permanent collection galleries as a departure point for thinking through an urgent question in our contemporary political landscape. Participants are invited to join together in open-ended discussions, and engage with creative practice. Study Sessions may take the form of workshops, listening parties, performances, readings, or film screenings. This session is led by Samantha Box, Ted Kerr, and Traci C. West. They will use Gran Fury’s Women Don’t Get AIDS, They Just Die from It as a jumping off point to engage participants in questions around art, HIV/AIDS, protest, and how images can move viewers from observation to active engagement.

Samantha Box has documented New York City's community of LGBTQ youth of color, the social issues affecting these young adults, and the structures of family, intimacy and validation that bind and protect them since 2005. Her most recent work, The Last Battle, currently in production, focuses on the impact of HIV on LGBTQ youth of color, and the community's attempts to fight back against this renewed epidemic through the activism of the Kiki Ballroom scene. Her work is part of the permanent collections of the Open Society Foundations, En Foco, Light Work and The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. Box was born in Kingston, Jamaica, was raised in Edison, New Jersey and is now based in the Bronx.

Theodore Kerr is a Canadian-born, Brooklyn-based writer, organizer, and artist whose work focuses on HIV/AIDS. His writing has appeared in The Village Voice, The Advocate, POZ, The New Inquiry and other publications. He is a founding member of What Would an HIV Doula Do?, a collaborative of artists, health care workers, activists responding to HIV through culture and community. Kerr’s art work has been curated by Sur Rodney (Sur) and Kris Nuzzi, and Danny Orendorff. Two of his works, in collaboration with Shawn Torres and Jun Bae, are part of DePaul Art Gallery's permanent collection. Recently Kerr was an interviewer for the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art's Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic: An Oral History Project.

Traci C. West is an activist-scholar who serves as the James W. Pearsall Professor of Christian Ethics and African American Studies at Drew University Theological School (Madison, New Jersey). She is the author of Disruptive Christian Ethics: When Racism and Women's Lives Matter, Wounds of the Spirit: Black Women, Violence, and Resistance Ethics, and the editor of Our Family Values: Same-sex Marriage and Religion as well as book chapters and articles. Her current transnational project focuses on activist strategies in Ghana, Brazil, and South Africa to address gender-based violence against black women, especially on the role of racism and religion, and how we might learn from them here in the United States.

Free with Museum admission during Pay-As-You-Wish Fridays. Pre-register to skip the line.

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Full Schedule

February 2, 2018
Damien Davis

March 9, 2018
Morgan Bassichis

April 13, 2018
Tuesday Smillie

May 4, 2018
Samantha Box, Ted Kerr, and Traci C. West