For the fifth annual Lea K. Green Artist Talk, The Studio Museum in Harlem is thrilled to feature curator Rujeko Hockley and conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas in conversation.

Creative collaborators and spouses, the duo will offer reflections of the momentous and tumultuous year, 2020. They will discuss the ways art, artists, institutions, and collective movements engaged, instigated, and enacted social, political, and civic change while also forecasting how to move forward into the unknown year, 2021, while retaining a sense of joy, hope, and possibility. This program will be streamed on Zoom and will feature live CART captioning.

The 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 Dawoud Bey (2019), Amy Sherald (2018), Jordan Casteel (2017), and Carrie Mae Weems (2016).

Rujeko Hockley is an assistant curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is the curator of the upcoming retrospective Julie Mehretu, opening in March 2021, and co-curated the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Additional projects at the Whitney include Toyin Ojih Odutola: To Wander Determined (2017) and An Incomplete History of Protest: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1940–2017 (2017). Previously, she was Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum, where she co-curated Crossing Brooklyn: Art from Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Beyond (2014) and was involved in exhibitions highlighting the permanent collection as well as artists LaToya Ruby Frazier, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Kehinde Wiley, Tom Sachs, and others. She is the co-curator of We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 (2017), which originated at the Brooklyn Museum and traveled to three U.S. venues in 2017–18. She serves on the Board of Art Matters, as well as the Advisory Board of Recess. 

Hank Willis Thomas is a conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to perspective, identity, commodity, media, and popular culture. His work is included in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. His collaborative projects include QuestionBridge: Black Males, In Search Of The Truth (The Truth Booth), and For Freedoms, an artist-run initiative for art and civic engagement. In 2017, For Freedoms was awarded the ICP Infinity Award for New Media and Online Platform. Thomas is also a recipient of the Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship (2018), Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), the AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize (2017), the Soros Equality Fellowship (2017), and is a former member of the New York City Public Design Commission.