PUBLIC PANEL DISCUSSION:
The Black Living Archive
Miles Greenberg, Dee Kerrison, Jon Key, and Kilolo Luckett
Finding new modes and methods for creating, curating, collecting, and collaborating in the art world.
Join us for a conversation on the expansive ways that Black artists express themselves artistically on their own terms.
Click here to watch the recorded panel discussion.
PARTICIPANT BIOS:
Miles Greenberg: Miles Greenberg (b. 1997 in Montreal, Canada) is a performance artist and researcher of corporal movement based between New York and Paris. His practice centers around a romanticized exploration of the Black body in space through durational performance, sculptural forms and gestures. His work consists of large-scale sensorially-immersive environments which revolve around the physical body.
At age seventeen, Greenberg left formal education and threw himself into a four-year independent research project studying movement and architecture as they relate to the Black body. This spanned a number of solo artistic/research including Ecole Jacques Lecoq and Musée du Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Red Gate Gallery Beijing and Long Island’s Watermill Center. He has a largely self-acquired background in linguistics, perfumery, butoh and physical theatre, and has studied under the direction of various mentors such as Edouard Lock, Robert Wilson and Marina Abramović.
Greenberg’s form is the result of rigorous methodology which resides at the threshold of performance and sculpture. The work follows self-contained, non-linear systems of logic which are best understood in relation to one another.
Dee Kerrison: Demetrio “Dee” Kerrison is a New York bred, South California based art collector, music enthusiast, financial services executive and social activist. While his career is in the financial service sector, his life’s work, along with his wife Gianna, is collecting art, specifically, the work of African Americans and other artists of color. Focusing on art that reflects his experience, it wasn’t only about collecting art but helping artists navigate the intimidating waters of the art world.
Jon Key: Jon Key is a Queer Black man originally from the small rural town Seale, Alabama now living and working in Bushwick, NY. A writer, designer, and painter, his work excavates the lineage and history of his identity through four themes: Southernness, Blackness, Queerness, and Family. Through the process of writing, photography and painting, Jon’s work is portrayed graphically through four colors: Green, Black, Violet and Red. Respectively, these colors intertwine memory and intimate recounting of the four pillars grounding the work.
Key’s work has been showcased in The Armory Show with Steve Turner LA, Carl Freedman Gallery, Jeffrey Deitch NY and included in personal and institutional collections including Yale University, AIEVA Institute, and The Dean Collection. Key’s work has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Atlantic. Jon was selected for Forbes 30 under 30 Art and Style list for 2020 and was the Frank Staton Chair in Graphic Design at Cooper Union 2018-2019.
As an educator, Key has taught at MICA, Parsons, and currently teaches at Cooper Union. He is the Co-Founder and Design Director of Codify Art, a multidisciplinary collective dedicated to creating, producing, supporting, and showcasing work by artists of color, particularly women, queer, and trans artists of color.
Kilolo Luckett:Kilolo Luckett is an art historian, curator, and writer. With over twenty years of experience in arts administration and cultural production, she is committed to elevating the voices of underrepresented visual artists, specifically women and artists of color. She is consulting curator of Visual Arts at the August Wilson African American Cultural Center and serves as an Art Commissioner for the City of Pittsburgh’s Art Commission. She is the recent founder and executive director of ALMA|LEWIS (named after abstract artists Alma Thomas and Norman Lewis), an experimental, contemporary art space for critical thinking, dialogue, and creative expression dedicated to Black culture.
Luckett has curated exhibitions by national and international artists such as Peju Alatise, Martha Jackson Jarvis, Amani Lewis, Thaddeus Mosley, Rashaad Newsome, Tajh Rust, Devan Shimoyama, and Stephen Towns. As an art consultant, Luckett was recently curator of Facebook Pittsburgh’s Artist in Residency program. Additionally, she was a cultural consultant for Atelier Ace and worked as the cultural attaché for Ace Hotel Pittsburgh. She created By Any Means, an art series that engages directly with leading cultural figures to broaden the scope and understanding of contemporary art influence by black culture. Luckett also served as managing director of the Homewood Artist Residency and was director of development for The Andy Warhol Museum. She served as the curatorial assistant at Wood Street Galleries, where she helped organize shows by Xu Bing, Louise Bourgeois, Larry Bell, Catherine Opie, Nam June Paik, and Tim Rollins + K.O.S. to name a few.
She is a contributing writer to the exhibition publication Halston & Warhol: Silver & Suede. Luckett is also writing an authorized biography on Naomi Sims, one of the first Black supermodels.
Luckett received her B.A. in the History of Art and Architecture from the University of Pittsburgh. She was a recipient of the 2015 Mayor’s Award for Public Art for the Homewood Artist Residency and Women and Girls Foundation Women in the Material World Award. Luckett was an honoree of the 50 Women of Excellence by the New Pittsburgh Courier. She is a former board member for the Braddock Carnegie Library Association (the first library funded by Andrew Carnegie), YMCA – Homewood branch, and Design Center of Pittsburgh.
She has been featured in national and international publications including Point Line Projects, Hypebeast, Sugarcane, and Black Art in America, where she was named one of twenty curators to follow on Instagram.
In her spare time, Luckett mentors young people, takes advantage of the great bicycle trails of Southwestern PA, and nerds out in libraries and archives.