February 21, 2024, 6:30pm
The Neuberger Museum of Art and the Purchase College, SUNY Global Black Studies and Media Studies programs are proud to host the inaugural Fred Wilson Lectures in Global Black Studies event featuring Tavia Nyong’o, Chair and Professor of Theater & Performance Studies, Professor of American Studies, and Professor of African-American Studies at Yale University.
About Fred Wilson and the lecture series
Fred Wilson, a 1999 John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur (genius) Grant Award winner, is one of Purchase College’s most illustrious alumni, earning his BFA with the college’s first graduating class in 1976. In his work, Wilson explores themes tied to histories of colonization and enslavement, critiques the imbrication of art history and art institutions with these histories, and transforms these histories via site-specific installations. Wilson’s interventions in museums have underscored the biases of the Western canon and the exhibition practices that derived from it. Wilson reframes the roles indigenous, Black, and other historically oppressed groups have played in producing Western art worlds through wall texts, the rearrangement and manipulation of objects and spaces. His solo exhibition, Fred Wilson, was on view at the Neuberger in spring 2017.
The Fred Wilson Lectures in Global Black Studies honor Wilson’s achievements and those of other Black makers and thinkers who shape our creative and cultural landscapes. The series will be a platform for learning, inspiration, and celebrating the rich contributions of Black artists and intellectuals to the global arts community.
Featured Speaker
Tavia Nyong’o’s current research and teaching interests span Black queer cultural and performance studies, contemporary art and aesthetic theory, speculative genres, Afrofuturism, and Black sound studies. Before Yale University, he was acting Chair and Associate Professor of Performance Studies at New York University.
In addition to his two books, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (2009) and Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (2018), Nyong’o writes for contemporary art and culture publications such as Artforum, Texte Zur Kunst, Cabinet, n+1, NPR, and the LA Review of Books; he also sits on several editorial boards.
Nyong’o has received fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the American Society for Theatre Research, the Ford Foundation, the Jacob K. Javits Foundation, and the British Marshall Foundation.
This event is one of the featured lectures during the Neuberger Museum of Art’s 50th anniversary celebration.
Additional support for this lecture featuring Tavia Nyong’o is provided from a gift in memory of Stanley Helsel, father of Amy Helsel ’85 and father-in-law of Jeremy Swerling ’83, to honor Stanley’s lifetime commitment to art and education.
