Guest Curator: Dell Marie Hamilton, artist, writer, curator; interim director o
f Cooper Gallery at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African &
African American Research
This
week's conversations are inspired by guest curator Dell Marie Hamilton and
collaborator Angela Counts current project, which engages speculative fict
ion, performance and public art to retell the story of Mark, Phillis, and P
hoebe, three enslaved individuals who were tried in 1755 Boston for the mur
der of their master. Bringing together a group of Black artists, scholars,
curators and cultural leaders, the cohort will be invited to engage with pe
rformance as a mode through which to contextualize America as nation, geogr
aphy, project, and myth. In particular, the group will contend with the rel
ationship between performance and the camera, which can be understood not o
nly as a technology of documentation but also as a witness (i.e. the lens a
s audience). Rooted in the specificities of Black performance, the cohort w
ill also consider the multiplicity of roles that Black practitioners must a
ssume in order to build and sustain a career in contemporary art particular
ly as they grapple with the implications of American authoritarianism.