In Response: Imagining Black Diasporas

Explore the concept of diaspora in Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics. Join artists and LACMA curator Dhyandra Lawson as they discuss how contemporary artists and poets reimagine their cultural heritage, transforming it into vibrant sources of creativity and aesthetic connections.

Edgar Arceneaux works in the fields of drawing, sculpture, installation, performance, and video, often exploring connections between historical events and present-day truths. Arceneaux has had solo exhibitions at such institutions as The Kitchen, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Vera List Center at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel, Switzerland; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria. His work has also been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, the Bronx Museum, Performa 15, and the Whitney Museum, New York; the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Art in Oslo; the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, among other venues.

Kambui Olujimi was born and raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. He received his MFA from Columbia University and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work challenges established modes of thinking that commonly function as "inevitabilities." This pursuit takes shape through interdisciplinary bodies of work spanning sculpture, installation, photography, writing, video, and performance. His works have premiered nationally and internationally at Sundance Film Festival, Museum of Modern Art, LACMA, Sharjah Biennial 15, 14th Dak’Art Biennale, and Kunsthal Rotterdam, among others. Olujimi has been awarded grants, fellowships and residencies from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Black Rock Senegal, MacDowell, and Yaddo.