Black Art Matters (BAM) Lecture Series

Allison Glenn

Allison Glenn is Senior Curator and Director of Public Art at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, where she provides senior leadership for CAMH's curatorial team, encompassing exhibitions, public projects, and artist-driven initiatives in the public realm; both within and beyond the walls of the Museum. Glenn is deeply invested in working closely with artists to develop ideas, artworks, and exhibitions that respond to and transform our understanding of the world. Recently, she received substantial critical and community praise for her curatorial work in the groundbreaking exhibition at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky titled Promise, Witness, Remembrance.

María Magdalena Campos-Pons

María Magdalena Campos-Pons combines and crosses diverse artistic practices, including photography, painting, sculpture, film, video, and performance. Her work addresses issues of history, memory, gender, and religion; it investigates how each one of these themes informs identity formation.

Tschabalala Self

Tschabalala Self builds a singular style from the syncretic use of both painting and printmaking to explore idea about the black female body. The artist constructs exaggerated depictions of female bodies using a combination of sewn, printed, and painted materials, traversing different artistic and craft traditions. The exaggerated biological characteristics of her figures reflect Self's own experiences and cultural attitudes toward race and gender. “The fantasies and attitudes surrounding the black female body are both accepted and rejected within my practice, and through this disorientation, new possibilities arise,” Self explains. “I am attempting to provide alternative, and perhaps fictional, explanations for the voyeuristic tendencies towards the gendered and racialized body; a body which is both exalted and abject.”

Charles Gaines

A pivotal figure in the field of conceptual art, Charles Gaines has long employed a generative process to create series of works in a variety of mediums. By creating space between a specific symbol and the systems applied to its representation through measurable values of color, Gaines's distinctive approach forges a critical link between first generation American conceptualists and subsequent generations of artists who are pushing the limits of conceptualism today.  

Kalup Linzy received his MFA from the University of South Florida. He also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Linzy has been the recipient of numerous awards including a grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship, Creative Capital Foundation grant and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Film and Video. His work is in the public collections at The Studio Museum in Harlem, Whitney Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is represented by David Castillo Gallery in Miami Beach and The Breeder Gallery in Athens, Greece.

Odili Donald Odita

Odili Donald Odita (b. Engu, Nigeria in 1966; lives and works in Philadelphia, PA) is an abstract painter whose work explores color both in the figurative historical context, and in the sociopolitical sense. He is best known for his large-scale canvases with kaleidoscopic patterns and vibrant hues, which he uses to reflect the human condition. For Odita, color in itself has the possibility of mirroring the complexity of the world as much as it has the potential for being distinct. In his paintings, we see color interwoven and mixed, becoming an active agent in representing the essential power that light has in identifying the entirety of our world. He thinks of his colors as agents to express thoughts, ideas, and transformational change. Much of his color selection is based on personal memories and created intuitively by hand-mixing, so that no two shades are ever repeated.

Ebony G. Patterson

Ebony G. Patterson received her BFA in painting from Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica in 2004. She received an MFA degree in 2006 in printmaking and drawing from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. Patterson has taught at the University of Virginia, Edna Manley College School of Visual and Performing Arts, and was an Associate Professor in Painting and Mixed Media at the University of Kentucky until 2018. Currently, she is the Bill and Stephanie Sick Distinguished Visiting Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.