Lunder Institute Talks: Tanya Sheehan with Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman

Recorded on via Zoom on Thursday, October 15, 2020, at 6 p.m., this is the second installment of the Lunder Institute Talks, a series of live, hour-long Zoom conversations with scholars and artists who are shaping the field of American art. Together, Lunder Institute area directors (Daisy Desrosiers, Theaster Gates, and Tanya Sheehan) and invited guests explore contemporary questions through artistic practice. Each conversation engages with artworks and/or ongoing projects related to the Colby Museum, including work by the invited artists.

Hank Willis Thomas is a conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to perspective, identity, commodity, media, and popular culture. His collaborative projects include Question Bridge: Black Males, In Search Of The Truth (The Truth Booth) and Writing on the Wall. Thomas is a recipient of the Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship (2018), Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2018), Art for Justice Grant (2018), AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize (2017), Soros Equality Fellowship (2017), and is a former member of the New York City Public Design Commission.

Eric Gottesman photographs, writes, makes videos, teaches, and uses art as a vehicle to explore aesthetic, social, and political culture. Gottesman is a 2020 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow, the recipient of a 2017 International Center of Photography Infinity Award, a 2015 Creative Capital Artist Grant, and a 2010 Fulbright Fellowship in art as well as an Artadia Award, an Aaron Siskind Foundation Artist Fellowship, a Massachusetts Individual Artist Fellowship, and other grants and awards.

Thomas and Gottesman are cofounders of For Freedoms, an artist-run initiative to merge political and artistic discourse, which was awarded the 2017 ICP Infinity Award for New Media and Online Platform.