Graduate Program in Media + Modernity | Princeton University

Legacy Russell

"Black Meme”
[Response Deana Lawson]

Tuesday, February 4, 2025 @5pm ET

Betts Auditorium (School of Architecture)

Acclaimed writer and Executive Director and Chief Curator of The Kitchen, Legacy Russell, presents her BLACK MEME video essay and book about “Black imagery that recasts our understanding of visual culture and technology.” Response by artist Deana Lawson.
 

Legacy Russell is a curator and writer. Born and raised in New York City, she is the Executive Director & Chief Curator of the experimental arts institution  The Kitchen. Her academic, curatorial, and creative work 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, a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency Fellow, a recipient of the 2021 Creative Capital Award, a 2022 Pompeii Commitment Digital Fellow, a 2023 Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellow, and a 2024-25 Lunder Institute for American Art Fellow. Her first book is Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020). Her second book is BLACK MEME (2024).

Deana Lawson is a photo-based artist whose work examines the body’s ability to channel personal and social histories, addressing themes of familial legacy, community, desire, and religious-spiritual aesthetics. Her practice borrows from simultaneous visual traditions, ranging from photographic and figurative portraiture, social documentary aesthetics, and vernacular family album photographs. Currently on view at the Kunsthalle Basel Museum in Switzerland, Lawson’s solo exhibition, Centropy, continues to develop these themes through a meticulously installed collection of photographs, mirror prints, drugstore pictures, holograms, and 16mm film fragments.


M+M strives to make everyone feel welcome. If you are concerned that Betts Auditorium will not provide adequate physical accommodation for you, please contact us in advance to discuss it.