Colored People Time Examined

In conjunction with the exhibition Colored People Time: Mundane Futures, Quotidian Pasts, Banal Presents, this panel of artists and scholars explore the history and impact of how the history of slavery and colonialism has shaped our country and impacts our present and futures through examining their respective contributions to the exhibition Colored People Time. This exhibition was conceived as a sequential exhibition unfolding over the course of 2019 at the Institute of Contemporary Art at University of Pennsylvania and is united as one exhibition at the List Center creating a new dialogue that will be investigated in this discussion. The panel participants include Aria Dean, Amber Rose Johnson, and Meg Onli. The discussion will be moderated by Tina Campt.

The event will be real-time translated for personal devices.  You may access real-time captioning here.

About the Speakers

Aria Dean is an exhibiting artist in Colored People Time: Mundane Futures and lives and works in Los Angeles and New York.  Dean is an artist, writer, and curator whose work examines the frameworks of our individual and collective identities. Her work has been the subject of solo and group exhibitions at such venues as Chapter NY, New York (2019), Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York (2019); Tai Kwun, Hong Kong (2019); The MAC, Belfast (2019); ICAVCU, Richmond (2019); Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles (2018); the Sunroom, Richmond, Virginia (2018); Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2018); de Young Museum, San Francisco (2017); Arcadia Missa, London (2017); and Veronica, Seattle (2017); among others. Her writing has appeared in publications including Artforum, TextArt in America, e-flux, The New Inquiry, X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, Spike Quarterly, Kaleidoscope Magazine, and CURA Magazine. She serves as Editor and Curator at Rhizome. She also co-directs Los Angeles project space As It Stands.

Amber Rose Johnson is a creative and critical thinker from Providence, RI currently based in Philadelphia, PA. She is currently pursuing a PhD in English and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and has previously held a research appointment in the Women and Gender Studies Department at the University of Toronto as a Fulbright Scholar. Her editorial projects include the exhibition catalog for Colored People Time at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and the exhibition catalog for Great Force at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Richmond, VA, and her writing has been featured in BOMB Literary Magazine.

Meg Onli is the Andrea B. Laporte Associate Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art at University of Pennsylvania and exhibition curator of Colored People Time: Mundane Futures, Quotidian Pasts and Banal Presents. Onli is a curator and writer whose work attends to the intricacies of race and the production of space. Prior to joining the Institute of Contemporary Art she was the Program Coordinator at the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. While at the Graham Foundation she worked on the exhibitions Architecture of Independence: African Modernism and Barbara Kasten: Stages. In 2010 she created the website Black Visual Archive for which she was awarded a 2012 Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. In 2014 she was the recipient of a research grant from the Graham Foundation for the collaborative project Remaking the Black Metropolis: Contemporary Art, Urbanity, and Blackness in America with curator Jamilee Polson Lacy. Onli holds a Master’s degree in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art. Her writing has appeared in Art21, Daily Serving, and Art Papers.

Tina Campt is Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities and Modern Culture and Media at Brown University and a Research Associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre (VIAD) at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Campt is a black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art whose published work explores gender, racial and diasporic formation in black communities in transnationally. She is the author of three books. Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (2004), Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe (2012), and Listening to Images (2017). Her forthcoming book, The Black Gaze, engages the work of black artists creating embodied practices of “witnessing” that center race and gender as central to our contemporary moment of visualizing blackness.

This program is free and open to all, but RSVP is encouraged. To RSVP click here.

*The event will be real-time translated for personal devices.