Join us for a compelling panel discussion moderated by Katherine Simóne Reynolds and featuring Kelley Lemon, Naima Green, and Alicia Olushola Ajayi.

This conversation will illuminate the many ways Black artists and practitioners are engaging with ecological narratives, uncovering hidden histories, and shaping future landscapes. This event is held in conjunction with the exhibition, it’s a fine thing, currently on view at the Stanley Museum of Art.

Moderator:

Katherine Simóne Reynolds is an artist, scholar, and curator who investigates emotional dialects and psychogeographies of Blackness. Her art physicalizes emotions and experiences through portrait photography, video, choreography, and sculpture. Reynolds has exhibited and performed work at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation and The Luminary in St. Louis and at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, among others. Solo exhibitions include the Jacob Lawrence Gallery, Seattle, and the Graham Foundation. She has lectured widely, including at the Contemporary Art Museum and The Saint Louis Art Museum. Reynolds is also a member of the Black Midwest Initiative at the University of Minnesota. Alongside her visual art practice, she has embarked on curatorial projects at The Luminary, SculptureCenter, and exhibitions for Counterpublic 2023 and the Clyfford Still Museum.
Reynolds recently guest curated the exhibition, it’s a fine thing, currently on view at the Stanley Museum of Art.

Panelists:

Kelley Lemon (she/her) is a registered landscape architect, and a LEED and EDAC certified professional. She practices both architecture and landscape architecture, with an emphasis in food, productive landscapes, and healthcare and mental/behavioral health environments. Her interests in design and theory of the built environment are built on storytelling and opening space to others to tell their story[ies], by researching and uncovering histories and ecological processes, engaging the people of the community, and developing new techniques and strategies to provide a solution that is of the place and vernacular.
In her design research in the built environment, she focuses on historical and contemporary productive landscapes, emphasizing Black communities, farms, and food across Illinois, toward a goal of broader awareness and education of these histories and for increasing public health of people and places. In this context, I study both rural and urban productive landscapes, as they both offer historical insight on Black migration, settlement, and land management practices. She employs methods of archival work and data collection, historical and current interviews, drawing and mapping, onsite fieldwork, and community participatory design.

Naima Green is an artist and educator who pictures individuals and communities to document their vibrant relationships to place and pleasure. She engages with various photograph forms, sound, installation, and experimental film. Throughout her collaborative practice, Green accesses and prioritizes the nature of intimacy, safety, and self-recognition. Often working in lush and watery environments, she presents windows into multidimensional experiences of seawater and its pathways: beauty, leisure, buoyancy, overwhelm, and submersion. Oral and written histories are critical to her process; by synthesizing archival research with outreach and conversation with current sitters, she frames picture-making and her praxis as a continuum and her still images as kinetic, living histories.
Green has two upcoming solo exhibitions at Astor Weeks and the International Center of Photography in New York. She has had solo shows at Baxter Street CCNY and Fotografiska, both NY, and the Institute of Contemporary Art at VCU, Richmond, VA. She has exhibited in group shows at the Getty Research Institute, University of Texas at Austin, Mass MoCA, BRIC, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Houston Center for Photography, and Gallery Factory, Minneapolis, MN, and others. She has been an artist-in-residence at Fountainhead Arts, Baxter Street CCNY, Bronx Museum, Center for Photography at Woodstock, MASS MoCA, Penumbra Foundation, Pocoapoco, and Vermont Studio Center, amongst others. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Barnard College Library, Decker Library at MICA, Flaten Art Museum, Fleet Library at RISD, The Getty Research Institute, Hessel Museum of Art, High Museum of Art, International Center of Photography Library, Museum of Modern Art Library, Hirsch Library at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, National Gallery of Art, Smart Museum of Art, Smith College Museum of Art, and Teachers College, Columbia University.

Alicia Olushola Ajayi is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP as well as an architectural designer, researcher, writer, and (still trying to figure it out) based in NYC. After receiving a dual masters in architecture and social work from Washington University in St. Louis, Alicia worked as an associate designer at MASS Design Group. There she contributed to the Equal Justice Initiatives Soil Collection exhibition and the ground-breaking Memorial to Peace and Justice in Montogomery, AL., a site dedicated to the racial terror and lynching throughout US history.
Recently she completed a master’s in design research from the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York. At SVA, she refined her research practice to be rooted in historical research and cultural theory applications. Ajayi is currently documenting and researching Brooklyn, IL, the first Black American town to be incorporated by 1829. Ajayi’s practice incorporates multiple writing forms from scholarly to commentary to experimental. Her work is featured in The New York Architecture in Review, PIN-UP Magazine, Metropolis, Architectural Record, The Architectural Review, Dear Friend, and The Funambulist. Ajayi serves on the advisory board of Oculus Magazine. She is the show producer for the upcoming podcast Curious Story Lab, an interview platform hosted by influential graphic designer Michele Washington, spotlighting designers of color. Ajayi is also the project manager at BlackSpace Urbanist Collective, a group of design professionals dedicated to protect and create Black spaces.

Artwork Caption:

In Celebration
2017
Screen print, hand-applied ink, Caran d’Ache monotype on multi-sheet paper
96 x 78 in. (243.84 x 198.12 cm)
Loan courtesy of artist

Tyanna Buie