This roundtable discussion took place on April 16, 2024 at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. It was conceived in conjunction with the exhibition "Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946-1962" at NYU's Grey Art Museum.
Though many Black artists who spent time in France embraced experiments with abstract modes of production-thus impacting the trajectory of modernist abstraction-they are often eclipsed by the constraining discourses around Abstract Expressionism and Civil Rights-era protest art. The roundtable “Black Abstraction | Black Existentialism” will think through and beyond modernist aesthetics, constructions of blackness, and geo-political relations to probe the uses of abstraction as a tool of subjective expression, radical politics, or opacity for Black artists throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.
Discussants:
• Lewis R. Gordon, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Global Affairs and Head of Philosophy, UCONN
• Erich Kessel, Assistant Professor of African American and Black Diaspora Arts, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU
• Darla Migan, Art critic and Faculty Lecturer, Parsons, The New School
• Denise Murrell, Meryl and James Tisch Curator at Large, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Moderated by JaBrea Patterson-West, Graduate Curatorial Assistant at the Grey Art Museum, NYU, and Ph.D. candidate, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU.
Co-sponsored by the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU; the Remarque Institute, NYU; and the Center for the Humanities, NYU