Thursday, December 3, 2020

7:00pm (EST)

Join online at >> yaleart.org/MickaleneJasmine

This event is free and open to the public. No advance registration is required—simply click the link above at the scheduled time to join.

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In a continuation of the Yale School of Art’s Speak to Me series, inaugurated during the summer of 2020 in an effort to address the NOW, 2020 Presidential Visiting Fellow in Fine Arts Mickalene Thomas will join with curator and activist Jasmine Wahi for a wide-ranging conversation on collectivity, collaboration, and their potential for expanding equity in the arts. The virtual dialogue, organized during the Yale School of Art’s 150th anniversary year as a co-educational professional school of art, will be hosted online and is free and open to the public.

Mickalene Thomas is a New York-based distinguished visual artist, filmmaker and curator who works in various mediums. She received her MFA from the Yale School of Art, and her BFA from Pratt Institute. She is a recipient of the 2019 Meyerhoff-Becker Biennial Commission at the Baltimore Museum, a 2015 United States Artists Francie Bishop Good & David Horvitz Fellow, and is an alumnus of the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Versailles Foundation Munn Artists Program in Giverny. Thomas is a recipient of the Aperture Award, Anonymous Was A Woman Award, the 2012 Brooklyn Museum Asher B. Durand Award, Timerhi Award for Leadership in the Arts, the Joan Mitchell Grant and the Pratt Institute Alumni Achievement Award in 2009, and the Rema Hort Mann Grant in 2007. She’s exhibited at Brooklyn Museum, The Smithsonian Museum, MoMA PS1, Seattle Art Museum, SFMoMA, National Portrait Gallery, Baltimore Museum, The Bass Museum, AGO Toronto, The Wexner Center, and Aspen Museum.

Her work is in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, The Whitney Museum, The Guggenheim Museum, The National Portrait Gallery, Newark Museum, Seattle Art Museum, The Hara Museum, The Rubell Collection, The Studio Museum in Harlem, among other public and private institutions and collections. She is on the board of the Brooklyn Museum of Trustees and MoMA PS1. Thomas has also previously served on the faculty of the Yale School of Art as a Critic in Painting/Printmaking, as well as frequented the School as a Visiting Artist. Thomas is currently exhibiting at CAC New Orleans with museum shows at the Baltimore Museum and the Bass Museum this year. Thomas is the 2020 Presidential Visiting Fellow in Fine Arts at the Yale School of Art, and a Pauli Murray Fellow at Yale University Pauli Murray College. She is represented by Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago and Nathalie Obadia in Paris.

Jasmine Wahi is the Holly Block Social Justice Curator at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and the Founder + Co-Director of Project for Empty Space, a Newark, NJ-based non-profit organization that supports artists who are interested in social discourse and activism. Her practice predominantly focuses on issues of female empowerment, complicating binary structures within social discourses, and exploring multi- positional cultural identities through the lens of intersectional feminism. In 2019, Wahi joined the TED speaker family with her first TEDx talk on intersectionality and visibility, entitled All The Women In Me Are Tired. Wahi is a Visiting Core Critic at Yale University and a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts: MFA Fine Arts department. Jasmine Wahi received her Masters in Art History from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.

Conceptualized in the late spring with the first events hosted throughout June 2020, Speak to Me began as an online forum with invited speakers, activists, writers, and artists originally organized with poet, playwright, author, and Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale Claudia Rankine, Leah Mirakhor, Lecturer in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, alongside Dean and Professor Marta Kuzma.

Envisioned as a series of virtual events through which the work of activists and organizers engaging in the continued fight for justice can be lifted up, the program continues to feature a series of individuals from across the United States, in order to facilitate a nationwide conversation on what is going on across the country geographically at the moment. With the aim of spreading awareness as to how ongoing conditions of state violence, racial capitalism, and COVID-19 concerns manifest in the protests and calls for justice we ask: What is to be done?

The summer conversations welcomed New Yorker critic Hilton Als, historian Sarah Schulman, musician and writer Greg Tate, and Muneer Ahmad, Yale Law School Professor, in conversation with activist and movement builder Lorella Praeli.

Speak to Me is made possible by the Yale School of Art’s Art and Social Justice Initiative, which aims to foster an awareness as to how a practicing artist in today’s landscape is both challenged and influenced by the current climate of political and social dissonance, turmoil of public opinion, and structural problems of inequity.