At this month’s Black Art Matters lecture, award-winning curator Valerie Cassel Oliver will discuss Kara Walker, her work, and her impact on the world of contemporary art.

Valerie Cassel Oliver is the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Previously, she was Senior Curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2000–17).

Valerie Cassel Oliver (Image credit: Contemporary Arts Museum Houston)

At CAMH, Cassel Oliver organized numerous group and solo exhibitions including Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970 (2005) and Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art (2012).

At the VMFA, she has presented Howardena Pindell: What Remains to be Seen (2018), co-organized with Naomi Beckwith; Cosmologies from the Tree of Life: Art from the African American South (2019) and most recently, the acclaimed exhibition, The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture and the Sonic Impulse on tour through 2023.

Cassel Oliver is the recipient of numerous awards including the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence (2022); The Alain Locke International Award (2022); The James A. Porter Book Award (2019); and The David C. Driskell Award (2011) among others.

Kara Walker is an African American artist among the best known in the contemporary art scene for her silhouettes and for her art that is socially committed to fighting racist stereotypes.

Born in 1969 in Stockton (California), Kara Walker moves as a teenager with her family to Georgia, in the deep south, where she studies at Atlanta College of Art and soon learns to fight against the rampant racism of the place. She then continued her studies at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence, where in 1994 she obtained her Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in painting and printmaking. She currently lives in New York where she is Professor of Visual Arts in Columbia University’s MFA programme.

Register to attend here 

Header Image: Kara Walker’s “Darkytown Rebellion,” 2001 projection, cut paper, and adhesive on wall 14×37 ft. Collection Musee d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean. Luxembourg. Photo courtesy of Kara Walker and Sikkema Jenkins and Co., New York