The Spring 2025 Graduate Art guest lecture series, organized by Jack Bankowsky

Glenn Ligon in conversation with Mashinka Hakopian

This event is free & open to the public. RSVP’s are not required.

See the full Spring 2025 Seminar schedule here.

Glenn Ligon (b. 1960) is an artist living and working in New York. Throughout his career, Ligon has pursued an incisive exploration of American history, literature, and society across bodies of work that build critically on the legacies of modern painting and conceptual art. He is best known for his landmark text-based paintings, made since the late 1980s, which draw on the influential writings and speech of 20th-century cultural figures including: James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Genet, and Richard Pryor. He received a Bachelor of Arts from Wesleyan University (1982) and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program (1985).

In 2011, the Whitney Museum of American Art held a mid-career retrospective of Ligon’s work, Glenn Ligon: AMERICA, organized by Scott Rothkopf, that traveled nationally. Select curatorial projects include Grief and Grievance, New Museum, New York, NY (2021); Blue Black, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, MO (2017); and Encounters and Collisions, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, United Kingdom and Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, United Kingdom (both 2015). Ligon has also been the subject of solo museum exhibitions at: Carré d'Art, Nîmes, France (2022); Camden Arts Centre, London, United Kingdom (2014); the Power Plant, Toronto, Canada (2005); the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (2001); and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN (2000). His work has been included in major international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (2015 and 1997), Berlin Biennial (2014), Istanbul Biennial (2011, 2019), Documenta XI (2002), and Gwangju Biennale (2000). His solo exhibition, Glenn Ligon: All Over the Place at The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom is currently on view until March 2, 2025.

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Mashinka Firunts Hakopian is an Associate Professor in Technology and Social Justice at ArtCenter College of Design and a 2024-25 Cambridge Visual Culture Research Fellow. Her book, The Institute for Other Intelligences, was published through X Artists’ Books (2022). A lecture-performance adapting this text has been presented at Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; the New Museum, New York, NY; 2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles, CA; and the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI. With Meldia Yesayan, she is the co-curator of Encoding Futures: Critical Imaginaries of AI (OXY ARTS, 2021) and What Models Make Worlds: Critical Imaginaries of AI (Ford Foundation Gallery, 2023). With Sarah Higgins, she is the guest co-editor of the ART PAPERS special issue (Spring 2023) on Artificial Intelligence.

Her recent multidisciplinary project, One Who Looks at the Cup, trains an AI model to perform tasseography, a method of divination practiced in the SWANA region since the 16th century. The project is a collaboration with Dahlia Elsayed, Andrew Demirjian, Danny Snelson, Atlas Acopian, Lara Sarkissian, and others; and is currently on view at REDCAT, Los Angeles, CA and the Asian Art Biennial in Taiwan. With Avi Alpert and Danny Snelson, she makes up one third of “Research Service,” a media performance collective whose work has been presented at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA; The Drawing Center, New York, NY; Judson Memorial Church, New York, NY; and the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France. Her writing appears, or is forthcoming in AI & Society, Performance Research Journal, Feminist Media Histories, Social Text, Los Angeles Review of Books, and in the Primary Information volume Barbara T. Smith: I Am Abandoned.

Image credits: Installation shot of All Over The Place at Fitzwilliam Museum, courtesy of the artist.

Support for this series is generously provided by the following: Jack Shear, Brenda R. Potter, Brendan Dugan, Lisson Gallery, Beth Rudin DeWoody, Sprüth Magers, BLUM, Hannah Hoffman, Alan Hergott, and David Kordansky

ArtCenter's Graduate Art program is based on intensive studio practice and rigorous academic coursework. The program is distinguished by its low faculty-to-student ratio that provides students with the attention and feedback they need to refine and achieve their artistic goals. Faculty and students are artists working in all genres—film, video, photography, painting, sculpture, performance and installation. A significant number of alumni have achieved national and international acclaim and often return to share their insights and expertise as visiting faculty and guest lecturers.