Public Lecture: Risa Puleo - Undoing is a Kind of Doing: 2023 Counterpublic Triennial and the Mound History of the Midwest

Risa Puleo contextualizes her curatorial contributions to the 2023 Counterpublic Triennial in St. Louis within the past, present, and potential futures of the mound structures that were built throughout the Mississippi River Basin, including Detroit, between 800 BC and 1600 AD and destroyed by settlers to the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. She will discuss how this 3000-year history influenced her decision to create a public art exhibition that evades surveillance and avoids restaging an occupation.

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

Risa Puleo is an independent curator and one of a team of curators who organized the 2023 Counterpublics Triennial in St. Louis. Her exhibition Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the American Justice System was curated for The Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston in 2018 and traveled to Tufts University Art Gallery in 2020. Monarchs: Brown and Native Artists in the Path of the Butterfly was curated for Bemis Center for Contemporary Art during her year as curator-in-residence, and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Blue Star Art Space and Southwest School of Art in San Antonio, The Nerman Art Museum in Overland Park, Kansas. Other exhibitions have been hosted by The Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; ArtPace, San Antonio; the Leslie Lohman Museum in New York City, Franklin Street Works in Stamford, CT, Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City, and more. Puleo has Master’s degrees from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and Hunter College and is a doctoral candidate in Northwestern University’s art history program. She has written for Art in America, Art Papers, Art 21, Asia Art Pacific, Hyperallergic.com, Modern Painters and other art publications.