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Karen Connell Speaker Series Fund: Curator and Cultural Organizer LaTanya S. Autry “Refusing Museum Myths as Curatorial Praxis”

September 26, 2022

Karen Connell Speaker Series Fund: Curator and Cultural Organizer LaTanya S. Autry “Refusing Museum Myths as Curatorial Praxis”

SEPTEMBER, 14TH, 2022

On October 3rd, the Art and Art History Department is pleased to host cultural organizer and curator LaTanya S. Autry as part of the Karen Connell Speaker Series Fund. On Monday the 3rd, Autry will deliver a talk titled “Refusing Museum Myths as Curatorial Praxis.” In the talk La Tanya S. Autry discusses how curatorial work grounded in care for people and the earth counters prevalent myths in museums and forges freedom ways.

As a cultural organizer in the visual arts, La Tanya S. Autry centers social justice and public memory in her work. In addition to co-creating The Art of Black Dissent, an interactive program that promotes public dialogue about the African-American liberation struggle, she co-produced #MuseumsAreNotNeutral, an initiative that exposes the fallacies of the neutrality claim and calls for an equity-based transformation of museums, and the Social Justice and Museums Resource List, a crowd-sourced bibliography. 

As a curator she has organized exhibitions and programming at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Yale University Art Gallery, Artspace New Haven, Mississippi Museum of Art, and other institutions. Through her graduate studies at the University of Delaware, where she is completing her Ph.D. in art history, La Tanya has developed expertise in the art of the United States, photography, and museums. Her dissertation The Crossroads of Commemoration: Lynching Landscapes in America, analyzes how individuals and communities memorialize lynching violence in the built environment, concentrates on the interplay of race, representation, memory, and public space.

This visit is made possible by the Karen Connell Speaker Series Fund

Public Event – Lecture – Peeler Auditorium
7:00 pm, Monday, October 3rd
Free and open to the public

Images: logo and portrait supplied by Autry