Graduate Lecture Series: Legacy Russell

January 28, 2020

Join curator, writer, artist Legacy Russell in a discussion on the construct, culture, and material of the “meme” as mapped to black visual culture from 1900 to present day. Using archival media Russell will explore the impact of blackness, black life, and black social death on contemporary conceptions of virality borne in the age of the Internet. Following the lecture Russell will screen her video essay BLACK MEME (2020).

Legacy Russell is a curator, writer, and artist. Born and raised in New York City, she is the Associate Curator of Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Recent exhibitions include Projects 110 : Michael Armitage, organized with Thelma Golden and The Studio Museum in Harlem at MoMA (2019); Dozie Kanu : Function (2019); Radical Reading Room (2019) at The Studio Museum in Harlem; and MOOD : Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2018-19 (2019) at MoMA PS1. Russell’s ongoing academic work and research focuses on gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new media ritual. She is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation 2019 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art and a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency Fellow. Her first book, Glitch Feminism, is forthcoming from Verso Books in Fall 2020.

Free and open to the public. Can’t be there in person? Watch on our livestream channel: