The Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University’s Lenfest Center for the Arts is pleased to present Dead Lecturer/distant relative. The exhibition presents a selection of works by Asian American and African American artists whose approaches to abstraction provided alternatives to prevailing vocabularies for representation and resistance during the social movements of the 1960s and 70s, and for whom the parameters of visibility continue to remain a problem for thought today. The exhibition is curated by independent curator Genji Amino.

Dead Lecturer/distant relative gathers an archive of visual art and poetics to pose questions about the relationship between loss and kinship, between history and memory, and between race and abstraction. How do we recall the voices of those for whom art history has never represented either a reliable record or the proper horizon of address? How do we share the news of an archive of experiment whose relationship to the contemporary continues to be compromised by an ongoing history of racial violence and colonial enterprise? What forms of intimacy, address and refusal have yet to be imagined in and through this archive that exceed the prevailing art historical vocabularies for modernism, innovation, and abstraction?

Soft opening: Saturday, July 9 (3-6pm)

The exhibition is accompanied by a symposium:

Che Gossett, Eunsong Kim, Ajay Kurian, Susette Min, Anni Pullagura, and Abbey Williams join curator Genji Amino to reflect on the questions of history and memory, race and aesthetics raised by the exhibition Dead Lecturer / distant relative, which presents a selection of works by Asian American and African American artists whose approaches to abstraction provided alternatives to prevailing vocabularies for representation and resistance during the social movements of the 1960s and 70s. Together we will ask the question: How do we recall the voices of those for whom art history has never represented either a reliable record or the proper horizon of address?

Genji Amino, Curator, Dead Lecturer / distant relative: Notes from the Woodshed, 1950–1980

Che Gossett, Racial Justice Postdoctoral Fellow, Initiative for a Just Society, Columbia Law School

Eunsong Kim, Poet and Associate Professor, Arizona State University; Associate Director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands

Ajay Kurian, Artist, Writer, and Educator

Susette Min, Associate Professor of Asian American Studies, UC Davis

Anni Pullagura, Ph.D., Curatorial Assistant, The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston

Abbey Williams, Artist