For the eighth annual Lea K. Green Artist Talk, the Studio Museum in Harlem is proud to honor Caroline Kent, who will be in conversation with friend and artist Amanda Williams at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

A 2021 Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize awardee, Chicago-based artist Caroline Kent explores the relationship between language and abstraction through paintings, drawings, sculpture, and performance, unveiling how such work can function as acts of translation.

In this conversation, Kent and Williams will explore the artist’s creative practice and philosophy, as well as considerations of gesture- and mark-making within the tradition of abstraction.

Please join us at 6:00pm for a pre-program reception. The program will begin at 7pm. This program is free to attend. ASL Interpretation and closed captions will be available.

The Studio Museum in Harlem's annual Lea K. Green Artist Talk brings together exceptional artists and cultural luminaries annually for critical dialogues on art and society. Previous honorees for the Lea K. Green Artist Talk include Carrie Mae Weems (2016), Jordan Casteel (2017), Amy Sherald (2018), Dawoud Bey (2019), Hank Willis Thomas (2020), vanessa german (2021), and Sanford Biggers (2022).

Caroline Kent received a BS from Illinois State University (1998) and an MFA. from the University of Minnesota (2008). Kent’s work has been exhibited in institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Guggenheim, New York; the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Additionally, the artist is the 2021 recipient of the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Joyce Alexander Wein Prize, and the 2020 Joan Mitchell Award for Painters and Sculptors. Kent’s work is a part of numerous public collections including the the Guggenheim Museum; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis; the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Art Institute of Chicago; the New Orleans Museum of Art; the Dallas Museum of Art; and the Minneapolis Institute of Art; among others. She lives and works in Chicago.

Amanda Williams is an artist who uses ideas around color and architecture to explore the intersection of race and the built environment. Through an interdisciplinary practice that brings spatial and aesthetic theory to bear on real social problems, Williams is clarifying the role of the artist in reimagining public space. Be it the latent value in vacant houses, the expansive palette of what blackness is, the speculative beauty of tulip bulbs or the social currency of childhood candies, Williams has an ongoing practice of elevating seemingly mundane objects and spaces to a renewed and often reformulated status of importance. Her work is in several permanent collections including the MoMA, NY; The Art Institute of Chicago; and the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the co-author of a forthcoming permanent monument to Shirley Chisholm. Amanda serves on the boards of the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Graham Foundation, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation and is a founding member of the Black Reconstruction Collective. Williams has been widely recognized, most recently being named a 2022 MacArthur Fellow. Amanda received her B.Arch from Cornell University. She lives and works in Chicago.