Join danilo machado, Lisa Anderson, and Imani Jacqueline Brown for the third installment of Conversations in the Commons. Using a combination of presentations and group discussion, our collaborators will reflect on the evolution of monuments and what it means to “monumentalize” in and for Black communities. They will explore the role monuments—as representations of White supremacy, slavery, and colonialism—have played in contributing to the degradation of Black people’s relationships to their history, culture, and environment, and how monuments may be appropriated to create and build these relationships anew. At the intersection of artistic intervention, community organizing, and historical scholarship, this conversation asks, how do we redefine “the commons”? Is the future of public space anti-monument? 

Inspired by the sculptural practice of Thomas J Price and in support of his exhibition, Thomas J Price: Witness taking place in Harlem’s Marcus Garvey Park, Studio Salon: Conversations in the Commons offers participants an opportunity to examine key themes and ideas addressed in Price’s practice through works of art and literature. Salon topics include fashion, surveillance, monuments and public space, and portraiture and Black masculinity. For each session, facilitators will unpack key texts through conversation and creative prompts, as well as supplementary materials for further explorations. 

Pulling from Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study and the exhibition’s curatorial vision, Conversations in the Commons aims “to (re-)define and (re-)imagine the commons.”  

This program seeks to provide opportunities to contemplate complex and abstract themes and to commune with new and existing peers.  

Live CART captioning provided by Stenocaptions and ASL interpretation provided by Pro Bono ASL. 

Studio Salon Monuments and Public Space additional texts

Conversations in the Commons |monuments participant bios

danilo machado

Born in Medellín, Colombia, danilo machado is a poet, curator, and critic living on occupied land interested in language’s potential for revealing tenderness, erasure, and relationships to power. An honors graduate of the University of Connecticut, danilo is producer of public programs at the Brooklyn Museum and curatorial assistant at Socrates Sculpture Park. danilo is the curator of the exhibitions Otherwise Obscured: Erasure in Body and Text at Franklin Street Works, Stamford, Connecticut, 2019-20; support structures at 8th Floor Gallery, virtual, featuring the 2019–20 cohort of Art Beyond Sight’s Art and Disability Residency; and We turn at EFA Project Space, New York, 2021. A 2020–21 Poetry Project Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow, their writing has been featured in Hyperallergic, Brooklyn Rail, Art Critical, Art Papers, Poem-a-Day, the Recluse, GenderFail, TAYO Literary Magazine, and alongside exhibitions at CUE Art Foundation, Abrons Art Center/Boston Center for the Arts, and Real Art Ways. They are working to show up with care for their communities.   

Lisa  Anderson

Lisa Anderson is the Interim Managing Director for the Black Cultural Archives. As a multi-talented independent curator, consultant, and champion for Black British art, Lisa founded @blackbritishart, a curatorial platform dedicated to celebrating this evergreen arts territory. In 2019, she established Lisa Anderson Art Advisory to advise collectors with a special interest in Black British Art. Lisa sits on the advisory boards of Addis Fine Art and Araba Scott Children's Foundation. She has also developed a successful career in fundraising and business development, most recently as the Corporate Partnerships Lead at the Lord Mayor’s Appeal.

Imani Jacqueline Brown

Imani Jacqueline Brown is an artist, activist, and architectural researcher from New Orleans and currently based in London. Her work investigates the continuum of extractivism, which spans from settler-colonial genocide and slavery to fossil fuel production. In exposing the layers of violence and resistance that comprise the foundations of United States society, she opens up space to imagine paths to ecological reparations. Brown’s work has been presented internationally, including in the United States, the United Kingdom, Poland, Germany, and the United Arab Emirates. She makes videos, organizes public actions, delivers testimony to organs of the United Nations, occupies billboards, writes polemics, performs lectures, and uses counter-cartographic strategies to unravel the spatial logics used by colonial-corporate agents to make geography, unmake communities, and break Earth’s geology. 

Studio Salon body copy

Studio Salon

Studio Salon explores the dynamic intersections of literature and contemporary art through artist talks, book launches and writing workshops.  

TJP Funder Credits

The Studio Museum in Harlem digital programs are supported by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation’s Frankenthaler Digital Initiative. Thomas J. Price: Witness is made possible thanks to the Open Society Foundations. Support for inHarlem provided by Citi and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. Additional support is generously provided by The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the New York State Legislature, and the New York City Council.