A History of Refusal: Black Artists and Conceptualism

Watch Thelma Golden, chief curator and director of The Studio Museum in Harlem, Hamza Walker, former associate curator and director of education of The Renaissance Society in Chicago, and artist Rodney McMillian discuss the work of Charles Gaines--and examine how his contemporaries have used conceptualist art practices to complicate ‘the black aesthetic’. This panel discussion was hosted by the Hammer Museum, in 2015.

“One of the most important things for me of having the Gaines exhibition at the Studio Museum was the way in which it both opened up our future but also was a very rigorous critique of our past . . . A question of a new art history is our art history. How do we write our own art history without some of the orthodoxies?” - Thelma Golden