A Conversation Series on Museum Practice: On Counterpoints

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About the Program

On Counterpoints

This conversation focuses on exhibition-making as a form of activism, the presentation of counternarratives, and efforts to incite institutional change.

With La Tanya S. Autry, Cultural Organizer and Independent Curator, Black Liberation Center; Kayleigh Bryant-Greenwell, Associate Director of Outreach and Operations at American University's Antiracist Research and Policy Center; and Krystal Strong, Professor of Education and Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania.

Moderated by Alisa Swindell, Associate Curator of Photography at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College and former Block Museum Curatorial Research Associate for A Site of Struggle.

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As a cultural organizer in the visual arts, La Tanya S. Autry centers social justice and public memory in her work. In addition to co-creating The Art of Black Dissent, an interactive program that promotes public dialogue about the African-American liberation struggle, she co-produced #MuseumsAreNotNeutral, an initiative that exposes the fallacies of the neutrality claim and calls for an equity-based transformation of museums and the Social Justice and Museums Resource List, a crowd-sourced bibliography.

La Tanya has curated exhibitions and organized programs at Yale University Art Gallery,  moCa Cleveland, Artspace New Haven, Mississippi Museum of Art, Tougaloo College, and the Crane Art Center. Through her graduate studies at the University of Delaware, where she is completing her Ph.D. in art history, La Tanya has developed expertise in art of the United States, photography, and museums. Her dissertation The Crossroads of Commemoration: Lynching Landscapes in America, which analyzes how individuals and communities memorialize lynching violence in the built environment, concentrates on the interplay of race, representation, memory, and public space.

Kayleigh Bryant-Greenwell is a Washington, D.C. based community engagement and antiracist practice specialist. In April 2022 she takes on the role of Associate Director of Outreach and Operations at American University's Antiracist Research and Policy Center. She comes to the role with over 13 years of museum and nonprofit experience at the intersections of public engagement, social justice strategies, and DEAI changemaking. Prior to this role, she served as the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s inaugural community engagement specialist and built the foundations for a new initiative building sustained relationships with historically excluded communities based in trust and reciprocity. She came to SAAM in 2018 as the head of public programs. Previously she developed nationally-acclaimed social justice public programming for the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum, National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Her writing is featured in recent publications The Inclusive Museum Leader and Museum Education for Today's Audiences, and the upcoming Seize the Moment: How Museums Can Prepare for the Post-Pandemic Age. Additionally she participates in the Museum As Site for Social Action and Empathetic Museum movements. She received her Bachelor of Art in Art History from the University of Maryland, College Park and Master of Art in Museum Studies from George Washington University.

Dr. Krystal Strong is an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. She holds a secondary appointment in Africana Studies and is a member of the Anthropology graduate group. Dr. Strong holds a PhD in Anthropology from University of California, Berkeley. Her research and teaching use ethnographic, participatory, and multimodal methods to investigate youth and community activism, global Black social movements, and the role of education as a site of struggle in the African Diaspora. Her current research projects investigate youth protest and leadership in Africa, and collaboratively document community-led organizing work around educational justice and Black communities in Philadelphia, her hometown. Dr. Strong is an active community organizer and her work as a core organizer with Black Lives Matter Philadelphia centers abolition, political prisoners, and Pan-African solidarity. With Mike Africa. Jr. of The MOVE Organization, Dr. Strong is helping to build The MOVE Activist Archive, a counter-archive of MOVE history and collective memory.

Alisa Swindell is the associate curator of photography at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. As an art historian her primary areas of interest are the history of photography and other modes of contemporary art with a focus on U.S. artists, race, and sexuality. Previously, she was a curatorial research associate at the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University. She has also worked at the Saint Louis Art Museum, Gallery 400, and in the Art Institute of Chicago's Department of Photography. She has been an independent curator, art reviewer, adjunct art history professor, and an arts administrator. She is completing her Ph.D. in art history at the University of Illinois at Chicago with a concentration in gender and women's studies; she holds MAs from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of New Orleans as well as an AB from Bryn Mawr College.

About the Series

On Collaboration, Context, and Counterpoints: A Conversation Series on Museum Practice

A three-part series in Zoom:

• Wednesday, April 13 from 6-7:30pm CT
• Wednesday, April 20 from 6-7:30pm CT
• Wednesday, April 27 from 6-7:30pm CT

Guests may register for as many sessions they wish.

Originating at Northwestern University’s Block Museum of Art, A Site of Struggle explores how artists have engaged with the reality of anti-Black violence and its accompanying challenges of representation in the United States over a 100 + year period. The Block Museum exhibition will tour to the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama August 13-November 6, 2022.

In conjunction with this exhibition, curators, educators, and scholars will share their reflections in a three-part conversation series on museum practice, engaging communities with care, and exhibiting challenging material related to race, violence, and our shared histories.

Lead support for this program is generously provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art. 
 

Contact The Block Museum of Art for more information: (847) 491-4000 or email us at block-museum@northwestern.edu