Grey Fund

Hamza Walker, director of LAXART, a nonprofit art space in Los Angeles, and an adjunct professor at the School of Art Institute of Chicago, will be in conversation with Jessica Vaughn, a Brooklyn and Philadelphia-based multimedia artist whose practice is a dedication to understanding materials and images and how they function politically, socially and conceptually in the world. Her most recent artworks in sculpture, video, and photography interrogate questions of labor, race, architecture and modularity in space.

Las Hermanas Iglesias is the collaborative team of Lisa & Janelle Iglesias, sisters born to Dominican and Norwegian immigrants in Queens, NY. The collective’s moniker anchors their identity within the contexts of feminism, teamwork, and multiplicity. For the past 15 years, the two have maintained an interdisciplinary, category-blurring collaboration alongside their individual practices. Las Hermanas undertakes their collaboration while living in different cities, usually through formal and informal residencies and extended on-site collaborative installations. Their practice has evolved to include a number of team efforts and variations such as our further collaboration with their mother, Bodhild. The team’s collaborative work has been exhibited at the Blanton Museum, El Museo del Barrio, Queens Museum, Abrons Art Center, ASU Art Museum, NMSU Art Museum, The Utah Museum of Fine Arts and others. Las Hermanas has been artists in residence at LMCC’s Paris program (France), Fanoon: Center for Print Research at VCUQ (Qatar), The New Roots Foundation (Guatemala) and the Textile Arts Center (US). Lisa Iglesias is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Art Studio at Mount Holyoke College and Janelle Iglesias is an assistant professor at University of California San Diego.

Deneane Richburg is the founder and Artistic Director of Brownbody. As the creative home for Richburg’s choreographic work, through Brownbody, she honors the complex narratives of U.S. based Black diasporic communities by taking participants on journeys that disrupt assumptions, ideologies, and disenfranchising popular narratives around blackness. As a modern dance choreographer and former competitive figure skater, Richburg is interested in pushing the boundaries of creative expression on the ice via engaging these narratives as a framework in which somatic based movement exploration occurs. Richburg blends different movement worlds and creates work for both the ice and the stage. Deneane grew up a competitive figure skater—spending time in a world that excluded her ancestry’s truths. Working and growing in this space, to quote Zora Neale Hurston, she always felt “most colored when [she was] thrown against a sharp white background.” She quickly realized she needed to carve out a space for herself and her ancestral history hence her decision to create Brownbody. Richburg received her MFA in dance and choreography from Temple University, an MA in Afro-American Studies from UW Madison, and a BA in English and African American Studies from Carleton College. She has created 15+ works for the ice and stage. Richburg is a recipient of a 2017 and 2022 McKnight Choreography Fellowship, administered by The Cowles Center and funded by the McKnight Foundation, a 2019 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, and a Dance/USA Fellowship to Artists made possible with generous funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.