Roundtable Discussion: Black Abstraction | Black Existentialism, Grey Art Museum (NYU)

This roundtable discussion took place on April 16, 2024 at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. It was conceived in conjunction with the exhibition "Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946-1962" at NYU's Grey Art Museum.
Though many Black artists who spent time in France embraced experiments with abstract modes of production-thus impacting the trajectory of modernist abstraction-they are often eclipsed by the constraining discourses around Abstract Expressionism and Civil Rights-era protest art. The roundtable “Black Abstraction | Black Existentialism” will think through and beyond modernist aesthetics, constructions of blackness, and geo-political relations to probe the uses of abstraction as a tool of subjective expression, radical politics, or opacity for Black artists throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.
Discussants:
• Lewis R. Gordon, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Global Affairs and Head of Philosophy, UCONN
• Erich Kessel, Assistant Professor of African American and Black Diaspora Arts, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU
• Darla Migan, Art critic and Faculty Lecturer, Parsons, The New School
• Denise Murrell, Meryl and James Tisch Curator at Large, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Moderated by JaBrea Patterson-West, Graduate Curatorial Assistant at the Grey Art Museum, NYU, and Ph.D. candidate, Institute of Fine Arts, NYU.
Co-sponsored by the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU; the Remarque Institute, NYU; and the Center for the Humanities, NYU