Panel Discussion: Identity and Power in Cultural Economies

In response to the 30 Americans exhibition, highly acclaimed and award-winning Columbia-based artist Michaela Pilar Brown is joined by California-based artist Andrea Chung and Georgia-based artist Jessica Scott-Felder for a conversation about identity against a backdrop of increased national anxiety around issues of race and inclusion. Q&A to follow. Face coverings required. 

Programming Support provided by Friends of African American Arts & Culture (FAAAC).

Free with membership or admission. Join today!

Free for college students thanks to Lead Corporate Sponsor Bank of America.

Panelists:

Andrea Chung lives and works in San Diego, California. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design and a Master of Fine Arts from Maryland Institute College of Art. Her recent biennale and museum exhibitions include Prospect 4, New Orleans, and the Jamaican Biennale, Kingston, Jamaica, as well as the Chinese American Museum and California African American Museum in Los Angeles, and the San Diego Art Institute. In 2017, her first solo museum exhibition took place at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, You broke the ocean in half to be here. Chung has participated in national and international residencies including the Vermont Studio Center, McColl Center for Visual Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work has been written about in the Artfile Magazine, New Orleans Times, Picayune, Artnet, The Los Angeles Times, and International Review of African-American Art, as well as in a number of academic essays examining colonialism and slavery in the Caribbean.

Jessica Scott-Felder is a visual and performance artist from Atlanta, Georgia, and an assistant professor of studio art at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. She completed her undergraduate studies in studio art at Spelman College and went on to earn a Master of Fine Arts in drawing, painting, and printmaking from Georgia State University and to study experimental printmaking at the Santa Reparata School of Art in Florence, Italy. Her latest performance art piece, Adornment, was featured in the group exhibition Africa Forecast at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta and also featured in the 2017 edition of the Emergency Index, a nationally distributed performance art catalog. Scott-Felder was the 2017 featured visiting artist at Ithaca College in New York where she presented her artistic research on Black Matter, an installation based on black hole physics, American folklore, Afrofuturism, and imagination. Her drawings have been featured in nationally and internationally recognized spaces such as the A.I.R Gallery in New York and the Telfair Museum in Savannah, Georgia. Her work is featured in private and corporate collections in Spartanburg, Cambridge, New York, New Jersey, and the Four Seasons Hotel in Atlanta.

Moderator: 

Michaela Pilar Brown is a multidisciplinary artist using photography, installation, collage, painting, and performance. Brown’s installations, collage, and photographs address issues attendant to the Black body. Brown is the 2018 grand prizewinner of the ArtFields juried art competition. She is a 2018 inaugural resident artist of the Volcanic Residency, Whakatane Museum, Whakatane, New Zealand. She was one of the six American artists selected to participate as a resident artist for OPEN IMMERSION: A VR CREATIVE DOC LAB produced by the CFC Media Lab, the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), and JustFilms | Ford Foundation in Toronto, Canada. Brown was an inaugural resident artist at the 2016 Sedona Summer Colony and a 2016 artist-in-residence, Künstlerwerkgemeinschaft Kaiserslautern, Germany, and has held residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the McColl Center for Art and Innovation. Her work can be found in private and museum collections in the United States. She is the executive director of 701 Center for Contemporary Art in Columbia, South Carolina. Her piece Speak No (2011) is on view in CMA collection gallery five. 

This program has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom.
 

^{Nina Chanel Abney
Khaaliqua & Jeff, 2007
Acrylic on canvas
61 x 63 3/4 in. (155 x 162 cm)
© Nina Chanel Abney . Courtesy Rubell Museum, Miami}