Join BGC faculty member Drew Thompson as he continues his exploration of the Polaroid as an object of Black material culture. In this conversation, he is joined by photographer and curator Zun Lee and poet Dawn Lundy Martin.
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Zun Lee is a visual artist, physician, and educator who was born and raised in Germany and currently divides his time between Canada and the US. Through documentary photography and archival and social practice, he investigates quotidian Black social life as a resistive strategy to cultural erasure and appropriation. Lee has a particular interest in Black family spaces as sites of intimacy and belonging. He is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow and has exhibited and spoken at numerous institutions in North America and Europe. His works are widely published and represented in public and private collections around the world.
Drew Thompson is associate professor of Black studies and visual culture at Bard Graduate Center, where he researches and teaches in the areas of African and Black diaspora visual and material culture. Curating exhibitions is a fundamental part of his teaching and scholarship. He recently co-curated Benjamin Wigfall and Communications Village, the first posthumous survey of the Black American artist Benjamin Wigfall, which opened in September 2022 at the Dorsky Museum before traveling to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. He is also at work on an exhibition about African metalwork that will open at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery in fall 2023. He authored Filtering Histories: The Photographic Bureaucracy in Mozambique, 1960 to Recent Times (University of Michigan Press, 2021) and numerous publications about the history of photography and contemporary art in southern Africa.
Dawn Lundy Martin, an American poet, essayist, and memoirist, is the author of four books of poetry: A Gathering of Matter /A Matter of Gathering; DISCIPLINE; Life in a Box is a Pretty Life; and Good Stock Strange Blood, which won the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award in 2019. Her essays can be found in The New Yorker, n+1, The Believer, and Best American Essays 2019 and 2021. Instructions for The Lovers: Poems is forthcoming from Nightboat Books. When a Person Goes Missing: A Family Memoir is forthcoming from Pantheon Books. Martin, a 2022 United States Artist Fellow, is also the Toi Derricotte Endowed Chair in English at the University of Pittsburgh and Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard College.
