Countering Racism Inside and Outside the Museum: Two Approaches
Heather Hart: Afrotecture (Re)Collection, 2021, University at Buffalo Art Galleries. Courtesy of the artist and Davidson Gallery. Photo: Nando Alvarez-Perez.
Organized by UB Arts Management Program, this virtual conversation between La Tanya S. Autry and Allison M. Glenn will be screened inside UB Art Galleries exhibition Heather Hart: Afrotecture (Re)Collection.
Location Change
This program will take place online only.
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. LaTanya 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, which analyzes how individuals and communities memorialize lynching violence in the built environment, concentrates on the interplay of race, representation, memory, and public space.
Allison Glenn is a curator and writer deeply invested in working closely with artists to develop ideas, artworks, and exhibitions that respond to and transform our understanding of the world. Glenn is Senior Curator and Director of Public Art at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. 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. an exhibition that reflected on the life of Breonna Taylor, centered on her portrait painted by Amy Sherald, and was listed on the 2021 Observer Arts Power 50 List.
From 2018-2021, Glenn was Associate Curator, Contemporary Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, where she shaped how outdoor sculpture activates and engages Crystal Bridges’ 120-acre campus. Allison has over a decade of experience in the field. Prior to working at Crystal Bridges, she was the Manager of Publications and Curatorial Associate for Prospect New Orleans’ international art triennial Prospect.4: The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp. Her writing has been featured in numerous exhibition publications and art periodicals. Her essay in Marshall Brown: Recurrent Visions, published by Princeton Architectural Press (2021) is forthcoming.
Allison received dual master’s degrees from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Modern Art History, Theory and Criticism and Arts Administration and Policy, and a Bachelor of Fine Art Photography with a co-major in Urban Studies from Wayne State University in Detroit.