Talk
New Yorker writer Vinson Cunningham moderates a four-part virtual symposium featuring intimate discussions with leading writers and observers of the New York scene.
The first session will focus on (but not be limited to) the protests that followed the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor earlier this year. We will ask how moments of protest and social unrest have remade New York City's public spaces—and how, in turn, public space has shaped the movements that have helped transform our world. So many of our most recognizable places—the Brooklyn Bridge, Union Square, Fordham Road—took on leading roles during those early June days. We will dig into how those spaces affected how the movement was represented: in print, through photographs and in the hundreds of video clips that made their way around the world.
About the Speakers:
Mark Clennon is an NYC based artist specializing in editorial, commercial and documentary photography. His goal is to capture the black experience in its totality—joy, pain, and triumph. Clennon, a Florida native and graduate of The University of South Florida, describes his work as whimsically defiant. His work has been featured by TIME Magazine,the New Yorker, New York magazine, Essence Magazine, Vogue, and more. You can view his photos of recent protests in New York City here.
Mabel Wilson is the Nancy and George Rupp Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, a Professor in African American and African Diasporic Studies, and the Associate Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia University. At GSAPP she co-directs the Global Africa Lab. Through her transdisciplinary practice Studio &, Wilson makes visible and legible the ways that anti-black racism shapes the built environment along with the ways that blackness creates spaces of imagination, refusal and desire. Her research investigates space, politics and cultural memory in black America; race and modern architecture; new technologies and the social production of space; and visual culture in contemporary art, media and film.