In Response: Imagining Black Diasporas

Explore the concept of diaspora in Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics. Join artists Edgar Arceneaux and Paul Mpagi Sepuya 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, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Vera List Center at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel, Switzerland; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Museum of Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria. His work has also been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, Bronx Museum, Performa 15 and Whitney Museum, New York; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Art in Oslo, Norway; San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, among other venues.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya is a Los Angeles-based artist working in photography. His work is in the collections of the Getty Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Hammer Museum, LACMA, MoMA, SFMoMA, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum, the Stedelijk, Tate Modern, and Victoria & Albert Museum among others. A museum survey of his project “DARK ROOM” was presented in 2024 at the Nottingham Contemporary and a  major hybrid artist-book and monograph of the project “Dark Room A - Z,” was published by Aperture in Fall 2024. His latest exhibition was “TRANCE” at Bortolami Gallery in New York and upcoming exhibitions include the Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre Brazil, opening March 2025 and a solo exhibition at Vielmetter Los Angeles in May 2025. He is an Associate Professor in Visual Arts at UC San Diego.