Co-presented by The Galleries at the John L. Warfield Center for African and African-American Studies
Free for students and Contemporary Austin Members; otherwise free with museum admission
Event will be held on the outdoors roof deck at the Jones Center on Congress Avenue
Join us on the rooftop for a conversation between artist Wangechi Mutu; Heather Pesanti, Senior Curator at The Contemporary Austin; and Kanitra Fletcher, Curatorial Assistant for Modern and Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where Mutu’s art is also on view.
Hear from Mutu about recent developments in her artistic materials, processes, and inspirations, and her ongoing interests in representations of the black female body and labor. The panel will consider Mutu’s work within the context of the artist’s trajectory and recent art histories.
About the Panelists
Learn more about artist Wangechi Mutu and her exhibition at The Contemporary Austin here.
Kanitra Fletcher is curatorial assistant in the Department of Modern & Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where Wangechi Mutu’s A Trinity is on view in the On Common Ground exhibition until February 4, 2018. Fletcher also is curator of video art for Landmarks, the public art program of The University of Texas at Austin, and a doctoral candidate at Cornell University, researching aesthetics and avant-gardism in black American modern art.
As Senior Curator of The Contemporary Austin, Heather Pesanti has organized monographic exhibitions of the artists Marianne Vitale, Robert Therrien, and Monika Sosnowska, including current projects by John Bock and Wangechi Mutu. In 2015, she organized the museum’s largest exhibition to date, Strange Pilgrims, a fourteen-artist, thematic exhibition on experiential art that engaged three venues. In 2014, Pesanti was paired with the artist and critic Robert Storr as joint visiting critics in the Viewpoint speaker series at The University of Texas at Austin. Prior to Austin, Pesanti was Curator at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, for five years.