The Lunder Institute for American Art is pleased to announce the Lunder Institute Talks, a series of live, hour-long Zoom conversations with scholars and artists who are shaping the field of American art. Together, Lunder Institute area directors (Daisy Desrosiers, Theaster Gates, and Tanya Sheehan) and invited guests will explore contemporary questions through artistic practice. Each conversation will engage with artworks and/or ongoing projects related to the Colby Museum, including work by the invited artists.

Schedule of Talks:

Daisy Desrosiers with Naeem Mohaiemen
Thursday, September 24, 2020, 6 p.m. EDT

Naeem Mohaiemen combines films, installations, and essays to research socialist utopia, malleable borders, and rhizomatic families (http://shobak.org). Mohaiemen is author of Prisoners of Shothik Itihash (Kunsthalle Basel, 2014), and co-editor with Eszter Szakacs of Solidarity Must be Defended (Tranzit, forthcoming). He is a 2020–21 Senior Fellow at the Lunder Institute for American Art, 2020–23 Mellon Fellow at Columbia University, and is on the Advisory Board of the Vera List Center for Art & Politics at the New School in New York.

Tanya Sheehan with Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman
Thursday, October 15, 2020, 6 p.m. EDT

Hank Willis Thomas is a conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to perspective, identity, commodity, media, and popular culture. His collaborative projects include Question Bridge: Black Males, In Search Of The Truth (The Truth Booth) and Writing on the Wall. Thomas is a recipient of the Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship (2018), Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2018), Art for Justice Grant (2018), AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize (2017), Soros Equality Fellowship (2017), and is a former member of the New York City Public Design Commission.

Eric Gottesman photographs, writes, makes videos, teaches, and uses art as a vehicle to explore aesthetic, social, and political culture. Gottesman is a 2020 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow, the recipient of a 2017 International Center of Photography Infinity Award, a 2015 Creative Capital Artist Grant, and a 2010 Fulbright Fellowship in art as well as an Artadia Award, an Aaron Siskind Foundation Artist Fellowship, a Massachusetts Individual Artist Fellowship, and other grants and awards.

Thomas and Gottesman are cofounders of For Freedoms, an artist-run initiative to merge political and artistic discourse, which was awarded the 2017 ICP Infinity Award for New Media and Online Platform.

Theaster Gates with Romi Crawford
Thursday, November 12, 2020, 6 p.m. EST

Romi Crawford (PhD) is a Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her research and writing explore areas of race and ethnicity as these relate to American visual culture (including art, film, and photography). She is co-author of The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s Chicago (Northwestern University Press, 2017). Additional publications include “Elements of the Gatesian Method: Contract Aesthetics, Black Bricks, and Extreme Collaboration,” in Land Art and Nothingness (Place Lab, 2018); “Reading Between the Photographs: Serious Sociality in the Kamoinge Photographic Workshop,” in Working Together: Louis Draper and the Kamoinge Workshop (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Spring 2020); and the forthcoming Fleeting Monuments for the Wall of Respect (Green Lantern Press, 2020).

For more information, and to register for these events, go to https://www.colby.edu/lunderinstitute/2020/08/31/lunder-institute-launches-new-virtual-talk-series-for-fall-2020/.

Tanya Sheehan
Director of Research, Lunder Institute for American Art
Colby College Museum of Art
William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Art
Colby College
tsheehancolby.edu
web.colby.edu/tsheehan