VIRTUAL | Curatorial Perspective: Angela Davis: Seize the Time

5 PM EDT/ 4 PM CDT/ 2 PM PDT

In response to our current state of distance, ArtTable is shifting programming online where we can. This event will take place as a live conversation! Registration is open to members and guests. We hope to see you there!

Members | $5.00

Guests | $10.00

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Join ArtTable for a presentation of Angela Davis: Seize the Time, which will open at the Zimmerli Art Museum on September 1, 2021, with Donna Gustafson, Interim Director, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and Mellon Director for Academic Programs, Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers.

Focusing on Davis and her image, the exhibition provides a compelling and layered narrative of Davis’s journey through the junctures of race, gender, and economic and political policy from 1969 to the present. The project is inspired by, and draws heavily on, a private archive in Oakland, California, that includes materials produced by an international community that assembled to protect Davis in a campaign to “Free Angela and All Political Prisoners,” press photography, court sketches, videos, music, and Davis’s own writings making it possible to document Davis’s work on issues related to freedom, oppression, feminisms, and prison abolition.

Beyond the archive, the exhibition positions Angela Davis as a continuing touchstone for contemporary artists who reference her history as a political icon and her texts on revolution, feminisms, and incarceration. It includes work by contemporary artists Sadie Barnette, Bethany Collins, Yevgeniy Fiks, Coco Fusco, Renée Green, Steffani Jemison and Justin Hicks, Roberto Lugo, Juan Sanchez, and Carrie Schneider, among others, who assert Davis’s significance as a black feminism intellectual and engage with her as a historical participant, contemporary thinker, and activist in a larger narrative that extends into the present. The book, published by Hirmer Press and available for purchase, includes contributions by the co-curators, Donna Gustafson and Gerry Beegan, the archivist Lisbet Tellefsen, scholar and curator, Nicole Fleetwood, scholar and curator and interviews with Angela Davis by René de Guzman and Tellefsen by Gustafson.

Donna Gustafson is the Interim Director and Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University. Her publications and exhibition projects at the Zimmerli include Tiananmen Square, 1989: Photographs by Khiang H. Hei (2019); Subjective Objective: A Century of Social Photography (2017); Jessie Krimes: Apokaluptein: 16389067 (2014); Rachel Perry Welty 24/7 (2012); at/around/beyond: Fluxus at Rutgers (2011); Water (2010) and Lalla Essaydi: Les femmes du Maroc (2010). She is coauthor with Andrés 

Mario Zervigón of Subjective Objective: A Century of Social Photography (Hirmer, 2017), and the author of George Segal in Black and White: Photographs by Donald Lokuta (Zimmerli, 2015), Amelia and the Animals: The Photographs of Robin Schwartz (Aperture, 2014), Almost Human: Dolls and Robots in Contemporary Art (Hunterdon Art Museum, 2005), and Images from the World Between: The Circus in Twentieth-Century American Art (MIT Press, 2001). She has published reviews and articles, presented papers, and participated in symposia and panels on a variety of topics in photography, American, and contemporary art. Her current project is an exhibition on the image and texts of the American activist and scholar Angela Davis to open at the Zimmerli Art Museum in 2021.

Thank you to Elisabeth Rouchau- Shalem, NY Programs Committee.