Leo and Betty Beckwith Lecture: American Artist

Join us for the 2024 Leo and Betty Beckwith Lecture: American Artist, co-presented with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

American Artist makes thought experiments that mine the history of technology, race, and knowledge production, beginning with their legal name change in 2013. Their artwork primarily takes the form of sculpture, software, and video—interactive installations that explore the pervasiveness of AI-driven surveillance, website interventions that speak to contemporary conditions of protest, and fictional films that contend with predictive policing that reproduces racial biases.

Artist is a recipient of the Herb Alpert Award in Visual Art and a Creative Capital grantee. They are a former resident of Smack Mellon, Red Bull Arts Detroit, Abrons Art Center, Recess, EYEBEAM, Pioneer Works, and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. They have exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Museum of Modern Art; Studio Museum in Harlem; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; and Nam June Paik Art Center, Seoul. Their work has been featured in the New York Times, Cultured, Artforum, and Art in America. Artist, born in Pasadena, now lives and works in New York.

The Leo and Betty Beckwith speaker series was established in 1978 to bring artists and cultural thinkers at the leading edge of contemporary art to the SMFA at Tufts community; past speakers have included Arthur Jaffa, Yvonne Rainer, Sanford Biggers, Amy Sillman, and Harry Dodge, among others.

This program is free and open to all – tickets will be made available through MFA, Boston.

Image: Photo by S*an D. Henry-Smith.

Generous support for TUAG programming is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.