The art world is a microcosm of the society we live in. It should come as no surprise then, that structural racism and capitalism permeates how we look at art, it informs the work that gets prioritized as important and taught in the many classrooms that shape the arts for generations to come. This panel discussion will address the inherent issues of the structures in place at institutions of higher learning that seem content or complacent in continuing to teach an art history void of the intellectual and avant-garde contributions by artists of color. Together we will examine cultural erasure, and discuss the nature of this oversight with the intention of identifying solutions to this problem. Please join Visual & Critical Studies student Anastasia Warren and alumni Shellyne Rodriguez as moderators for this discussion.
Free and open to the public.  No RSVP required.
Panelists:
Robin J. Hayes, PhD wrote/directed/produced the award-winning documentary Black and Cuba. She’s developing the television series Fortune, an adaptation of the prize-winning novel In the Land of Love and Drowning. Hayes is also directing the documentary 9 Grams, part of a multi-platform project produced by S. Epatha Merkerson. A Yale and NYU alum, Hayes received Ford Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities funding for her work. She is currently Assistant Professor at The New School in New York City.
Tomashi Jackson was born in Houston, Texas and raised in Los Angeles, California. She holds a MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art. She earned a degree of Science Master of Art, Culture, and Technology from the M.I.T. School of Architecture and Planning in 2012. Her work has been featured in BOMBLOG, The Harvard Crimson, The Yale Daily News, The Yale Herald, Art Papers,Artnet News, and Hyperallergic. She is represented by Jack Tilton Gallery in New York City and teaches Drawing and Interrelated Media Practice at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.She lives and works in New York City and Cambridge, MA
Cheryl R. Riley is a National Endowment for the Arts recipient whose visual art and furniture designs are in the collections of the Smithsonian, the Mint Museum of Architecture and Design, the cities of New York and Atlanta, among others. She has served on the executive boards of major institutions such as the groundbreaking Capp Street Project, the Museum of Arts and Design and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s SECA council. Cheryl is developing several installation based and performance projects through residencies such as a recently awarded Vermont Studio Center fellowship. She has also written about art and artists for national publications and is a private and corporate art advisor with a focus on artists of the African Diaspora.
Bill Gaskins is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art and the American Studies Program at Cornell University. As an artist he explores the intersections of photography, cinema, and portraiture in the twenty first century from an interdisciplinary enagement that include his body of essays on art and culture through the frames of history of photography, art history, American and African American Studies scholarship. An important entry point for the work of Bill Gaskins is his fascination with the myths of photography and American life as revealed through representations of race in visual culture. He has been on the faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Missouri, and Parsons School of Design and has been extensively engaged with art in higher education in pedagogy and policy. He was awarded a Distinguished Teaching Award at Parsons in 2012 and was awarded the Watts Prize for Teaching Excellence from the Cornell University Department of Art in 2016.
Moderators:
Shellyne Rodriguez is an artist and activist born and raised in the South Bronx, whose work centers on strategies of survival and its varied malleable forms. Her practice endeavors to reimagine these strategies as gestures, narratives, objects, and pictures using a variety of sources and mediums to think and to make. A decolonial practice rooted in Hip Hop Culture. Shellyne graduated with a BFA in Visual & Critical Studies From the School of Visual Arts in New York City and an MFA in Fine Art from Hunter College and has had her work and projects exhibited at El Museo del Barrio, Queens Museum, and the New Museum. Shellyne describes her activism as not exceptional, but a social responsibility, especially for artists, now more than ever.
Born in The Bronx, Anastasia Warren lives and works in New York City. She is currently attending The School of Visual Arts pursuing a degree in Visual Critical Studies. Her work explores identity, justice, and imitation. She has interned at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and ClampArt and exhibited at Space 776. Her work has been featured in Afropunk, New Museum’s Black Women Artist for Black Lives Matter exhibition, and her self curated group show, Say Her Name: Being Here and Now. She is interested in exposing discriminatory practices in academia and decolonizing art spaces.