Founded in 2023, the Lunder Institute Summer Think Tank is an annual initiative that brings together artists, scholars, museum professionals, and culture-bearers in a fertile space to engage in dialogue. A conversation-based program, the Summer Think Tank raises pressing questions in the field of American art, with the aim of advancing new ideas, methodologies, and relationship building. As an incubator for research and practice, the Summer Think Tank provides a platform for fostering, documenting, and sharing the exchange of knowledge. Though Summer Think Tank conversations are not open to the general public, each discussion is recorded and preserved in our oral history archive for researchers to access.

The Lunder Institute’s first Summer Think Tank gathered together more than thirty thought leaders across disciplines to engage in conversation about urgent questions and topics relevant to American art, with particular attention to the ways in which Blackness and the Black experience are central to American art, its history, and its future. Over the course of ten weeks, Summer Think Tank participants convened onsite to address lines of inquiry related to the intersection of creative practice and American identity, dismantling racism in institutions, archiving Black art, and Black art history, performance art, feminisms, and aesthetics.

Since its establishment, the Lunder Institute has worked to move the field of American art and its practitioners toward an inclusive representation of American art and the complex experiences and histories it reflects. The Summer Think Tank: __________ American 2023 built on the Lunder Institute’s track record of convening artists and scholars to instigate new thinking and practice in the field.