Public Lecture: Hamza Walker - Thinking About MONUMENTS

Since 2017, Walker has been working on MONUMENTS, an exhibition that features roughly a dozen decommissioned monuments to be shown alongside works of contemporary art. Slated to open in the Fall of 2025, the exhibition is being co-organized with The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and is co-curated with artist Kara Walker and MOCA’s Senior Curator, Bennett Simpson. This talk will use two earlier exhibitions that Hamza Walker curated (Black Is, Black Aint (2008), Several Silences (2009)) to discuss the theoretical and historical framework underpinning MONUMENTS.

Cranbrook Academy of Art’s 2023-24 Public Lecture Series is free and open to the public in the deSalle Auditorium at Cranbrook Art Museum. On Thursdays, Cranbrook Art Museum’s galleries are also free and open late. Please arrive early to see their current exhibitions before the lecture.

Hamza Walker is Director of LAXART, a nonprofit art space in Los Angeles. Prior to joining LAXART in 2016, he was director of education and associate curator at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, a non-collecting contemporary art museum. Recent exhibitions at LAXART include Nikita Gale, Takers, 2022; Kandis Williams/Cassandra Press’ The Absolute Right to Exclude (2021); and Postcommodity’s Some Reach While Others Clap (2020).