Slavery North invites you to the fourth in our series of five Fellow Talks in Spring 2025. Professor Alex Callender shares how her artistic practice traces the way Northern Slavery shaped ecological histories, plant migrations, and conceptions of landscape and racialized geographies.
This hybrid talk is open to students, faculty, staff, and members of the public.
Date/Time: Friday, April 25, 2025, 2:30-3:30 PM (EDT)
Location: Slavery North, Room 118, Ground Floor, 472 North Pleasant Street, UMass Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA, 01003
Online via Zoom:
https://umass-amherst.zoom.us/j/93086338237
Meeting ID: 930 8633 8237
Speaker: Alex Callender, Artist-in-Residence Fellow, Spring 2025
Moderator: Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson, Provost Professor of Art History & Founding Director Slavery North
Lecture: Imaginative Geographies and Radical Annotation
Transfer and Oil on Canvas, 18 x 18 inches
Lecture Abstract:
Northern Slavery and the histories or racial formation which have shaped our present are also recorded through ecological histories, plant migrations, and conceptions of landscape and racialized geographies. Engaging colonial archives as space for errantry and artistic intervention, may invite other ways to imagine human and non-human relations that were indelibly reframed through Atlantic Slavery and the economic systems of racial capitalism left in its wake.
Bio:
Alex Callender’s practice uses methods of drawing, painting, and installation to trace and remap historical materials to explore with both criticality and care, how we might disentangle the interwoven relations of race, gender, and capitalism. Callender has had solo exhibitions and projects at island gallery (NYC), ArtYard (NJ), the Center for the Arts Northeastern University, UMass Contemporary Museum of Art, NYU Gallatin Galleries, and Michigan State University’s LookOut Gallery. Alex has received artist grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the Massachusetts Cultural Council and has held artist residencies + fellowships with Women’s Studio Workshop, MacDowell Colony, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, The Drawing Center, Art in Embassies Program, Vermont Studio Center, Santa Fe Art Institute, Alice Yard in Trinidad, and DRAWinternational and The BAU Institute in France. Callender is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Smith College.
For more information, please contact Emily Davidson (Director of Research and Engagement, Slavery North): [email protected]
