The Center for the Arts is pleased to host a conversation between interdisciplinary artist Alex Callender (Smith College) and Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw (University of Pennsylvania). The conversation will be moderated by Center for the Arts Director Juliana Barton. Alex Callender’s solo exhibition, “A Place for Not Forgetting,” was previously on view in the Center for the Arts Gallery360 in 2022. Learn more about “A Place for Not Forgetting” here. This event is co-sponsored by the College of Social Sciences and Humanities’ Africana Studies Department. A small reception to follow. Register using the link attached.
Artist Bio: Alex Callender’s studio practice incorporates painting, drawing, and installation to explore intersections between myth, colonial legacies, and material culture. Through the visual forms of historical narrative, repurposed archival imagery, and speculative fictions, she considers questions of race and borders, environmental instability, and hybridized landscapes. Callender has exhibited nationally and internationally, and has held studio residencies with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The Drawing Center’s Open Session program, the Art in Embassies Program, Santa Fe Art Institute, The Vermont Studio Center, Urban Glass, the Santa Fe Art Institute, Alice Yard in Trinidad, and DRAWinternational and The BAU Institute in France. Raised in New York City, Callender now lives in western Massachusetts and is an Assistant Professor of Art at Smith College, she will be a researcher-in-residence at the Schomburg Center in New York, Fall 2021.
Speaker Bio: Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw is the Class of 1940 Bicentennial Term Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on portraiture and issues of representation, with an emphasis on the construction of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the United States. She has previously served on the faculty of Harvard University and as the Director of Research, Publications, and Scholarly Programs at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. In addition to her books, Seeing the Unspeakable: The Art of Kara Walker (Duke: 2004) and First Ladies of the United States (Smithsonian: 2020), she has also curated numerous exhibitions, including “Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century” (2006), “Represent: 200 Years of African American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art” (2015), and “I Dream a World: Selections from Brian Lanker’s Portraits of Remarkable Black Women,” now on view (through August 2023) at the National Portrait Gallery.