Please join us for Jess Atieno’s Visiting Artist Talk as Jackman Goldwasser International Resident where she will speak about her work in conversation with Antawan I. Byrd, Andrew Mellon-COSI Curatorial Fellow in the department of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago. 

Atieno utilizes mixed media techniques to explore human interaction with(in) minority groups as it plays out in physical, virtual, and psychological spaces. Much of her recent work has adopted an archival format, incorporating photography, found images and biographical text. Recreating these allows Atieno to examine the role of self in shaping collective histories and to map alternative futures within a shared space and time.

Byrd is completing his PhD in modern and contemporary art history at Northwestern University. His dissertation, Interferences: Sound, Technology, and the Politics of Listening in Afro-Atlantic Art, examines how African and African diasporic artists combine sonic and visual cultural forms or formations to engage the anti-colonial and civil-rights politics of the long 1960s. Byrd is currently an Andrew Mellon-COSI Curatorial Fellow in the department of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, and will begin a two-year appointment there as an Assistant Curator of Photography in Fall of 2018. From 2014-2015, he was a Graduate Curatorial Fellow at Northwestern’s Block Museum of Art where he co-curated Kader Attia/Reflecting Memory (2017). Byrd was associate curator for Telling Time, the 10^th Bamako Encounters Biennale of African Photography (2015). From 2009-2011, he was a Fulbright fellow and curatorial assistant at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos.