The Un-Private Collection: Mickalene Thomas + dream hampton + Darnell L. Moore on bell hooks (SOLD OUT)
Overview
Join three influential thinkers and activists from different creative fields as they come together to respond to the words of feminist icon, bell hooks. This iteration of The Un-Private Collection series will draw from quotes found in All About Love: New Visions by the author. Projected onscreen in Oculus Hall, the words and phrases will spark an open dialogue between audience members and our guest speakers exploring the meanings present in bell hooks’s writing and making new ones. Internationally known and award-winning multi-hyphenate artist Mickalene Thomas; Peabody Award-winning documentarian and filmmaker dream hampton; and Lambda Literary Award-winning author, activist, and scholar Darnell L. Moore, have all been deeply influenced and inspired by hooks, and the format of the event places emphasis on the lasting—even renewed—importance of her work in which love is an active process rooted in healing, carving a path away from domination and towards collective liberation. The Broad’s special exhibition, Mickalene Thomas: All About Love, which shares its title with the pivotal text by hooks, is on view through September 29, 2024.
Stop by The Shop at The Broad before or after the event to pick up copies of All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks as well as limited signed Mickalene Thomas monographs and signed copies of No Ashes in the Fire by Darnell L. Moore.
Tickets include one-time access to The Broad, including Mickalene Thomas: All About Love and our third-floor collection galleries during regular museum hours between Saturday, July 27, and Sunday, August 4, 2024. The museum will be closed when this program ends; please plan your visit accordingly.
Tickets to this event do not include access to Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Room—The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away (2013), and must be booked separately.
To learn more and plan your trip, visit Know Before You Go & FAQ. Visitor policies are subject to change.
Biographies
Mickalene Thomas
Born in 1971 in Camden, New Jersey, Mickalene Thomas completed her MFA from the Yale University School of Art in 2002 and a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2003. Soon after she became well known for her large-scale acrylic paintings of Black women in states of leisure and repose using rhinestones, a central material in her practice that symbolizes the complexities of femininity. Depicting women with confident and assured expressions, the subjects of her works are often seen in domestic interiors from Black America, claiming the agency of womanhood while deconstructing the art historical canon. Similarly, Thomas’s photographs, collages, and figurative paintings often re-stage scenes from 19th century French painters such as Henri Matisse and Édouard Manet, pushing back against the subjugation and oppressive narratives upheld by Western archives, cultural institutions, and representation systems.
Photo of Mickalene Thomas by Emil Horowitz
dream hampton
dream hampton is an award-winning filmmaker and writer from Detroit. For three decades her essays and cultural criticism helped shape a generation. Her most recent works include the award-winning short film Freshwater (NYT OpDocs/PBS, 2023), Ladies First (Netflix, 2023), and the visual memoir/feature documentary It Was All A Dream, which debuted at Tribeca Film Festival in 2024. Selected works include Treasure (Frameline, 2015) and the Emmy-nominated Surviving R. Kelly (Netflix, 2019), which broke ratings records and earned her a Peabody Award. In 2019, hampton was named one of TIME 100's most influential people in the world.
Photo courtesy of the artist
Darnell L. Moore
Darnell L. Moore is an author, producer and creative hailing from Camden, New Jersey. His widely acclaimed memoir No Ashes in the Fire: Coming Of Age Black and Free in America won the Lambda Literary Award in 2019. His memoir was celebrated as one of the New York Times 100 Notable Books, and it was selected as a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers' pick. In addition to his writing, Darnell has served as a writer-in-residence at the Center on African American Religion, Sexual Politics, and Social Justice at Columbia University. He was also a 2019 Senior Fellow at the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California. And over the course of his two-decade-long career, he has worked in the fields of education, non-profit administration, higher education, and media. He was one of the principal organizers within the Movement for Black Lives and co-organized the Black Lives Matter freedom ride to Ferguson with Patrisse Cullors. More recently, Darnell served as the Vice President of Inclusion Strategy at Netflix. His insightful writings have been featured in prominent publications including the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Playboy, VICE, The Guardian, The Nation, and EBONY, among many others. Currently, he’s hard at work on his second book, tentatively titled I Can Show You Better Than I Can Tell You: Black Men Freeing Ourselves, and he’s finishing the final season of his award-winning podcast, Being Seen. This year, he started a boutique creative consulting agency, Six Zero Nine Creatives, whose name is an homage to Camden, his hometown.
Photo courtesy of the artist
About The Un-Private Collection
The Un-Private Collection is an ongoing series of public programs The Broad began in September 2013. The series introduces audiences to the museum’s 2,000-work contemporary art collection by showcasing stories behind the collection, the collectors and the artists. Since launching the program, The Broad has brought together a variety of artists whose works are in the Broad collection in conversation with cultural leaders, including Mark Bradford with Katy Siegel, Shirin Neshat with Christy MacLear, Jeff Koons with John Waters, Takashi Murakami with Pico Iyer, Eric Fischl with Steve Martin, John Currin with James Cuno, Kara Walker with Ava DuVernay and architect Elizabeth Diller with Eli Broad, Joanne Heyler and Paul Goldberger. Talks have been held at venues throughout Los Angeles, making the programming available to audiences across the city. Conversations are live-streamed and full videos of past talks are available online. The Un-Private Collection series is part of the Broad collection’s 30-year mission to make contemporary art accessible to the widest possible audience.
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