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“Roundtable Discussion: Black Abstraction | Black Existentialism”

Program: “Roundtable Discussion: Black Abstraction | Black Existentialism”
Discussion with Prof. Lewis R. Gordon, Prof. Erich Kessel, Dr. Darla Migan, Dr. Denise Murrell, moderated by JaBrea Patterson-West

Original program date: April 16, 2024

Though many Black artists who spent time in France experimented with abstract modes of production—thus impacting the trajectory of modernist abstraction—their efforts are often eclipsed by the constraining discourses around Abstract Expressionism and Civil Rights-era protest art. This roundtable will think through and beyond modernist aesthetics, constructions of Blackness, and geopolitical relations to probe the use of abstraction as a tool of subjective expression, radical politics, or opacity for Black artists throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.

Co-sponsored by the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU; the Remarque Institute, NYU; and the Center for the Humanities, NYU