Join Huey Copeland, Thomas Lax, and Glenn Ligon in conversation, followed by a performance by musician Alicia Hall Moran, in celebration of Copeland's new book, Touched by the Mother: Black Men, American Art, Feminist Horizons, published by University of Chicago Press. In Touched by the Mother, Copeland writes about a range of cultural production by Black men and artistic practices that investigate Black masculinity in the United States.

This program is part of the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Studio Salon, which explores the dynamic intersections of literature and contemporary art through artist talks, book launches, and writing workshops.

This event is free and open to the public. ASL interpretation will be provided.

Huey Copeland is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Art and Black Study at the University of Pittsburgh. His work interrogates African/Diasporic, American, and European artistic praxis from the late eighteenth century to the present from a Black feminist perspective that reveals the biases and elisions of the discipline. An editor of the journal OCTOBER and co-editor, with Steven Nelson, of the award-winning volume Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World (Yale UP 2023), Copeland is the author of numerous articles, essays, and interviews. His books include the anthology OCTOBER File 32: Glenn Ligon (MIT Press, 2026), Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America (2013) and Touched by the Mother: Black Men, American Art, Feminist Horizons (2026), both published by University of Chicago Press.

T. Lax is a curator and writer who supports artistic process and enjoys working with others. Most recently, they organized Artist’s Choice: Arthur Jafa—Less Is Morbid (2025), an exhibition of artworks selected from MoMA’s collection by the L.A–based artist; and Jonathan Berger: Studio Residency (2025), a time-based exhibition that put the notion of “radical diasporism” into practice. Previously, in collaboration with Connie Butler and Kari Rittenbach, they co-organized Ceremonies Out of the Air: Ralph Lemon (2023), a major exhibition about the path-making choreographer at MoMA PS1. Lax also organized the exhibition Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces (2022) with Lilia Rocio Taboada about the gallery founded by Linda Goode Bryant in 1974, where “blackness existed in the presence of black folks rather than in the absence of whiteness.”

Throughout his career, the artist Glenn Ligon has pursued an incisive exploration of American history, literature, and society across bodies of work that build critically on the legacies of modern painting and conceptual art. He earned his BA from Wesleyan University (1982) and attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program (1985). In 2011 the Whitney Museum of American Art held a mid-career retrospective, AMERICA, organized by Scott Rothkopf, that traveled nationally. Important recent solo exhibitions include Glenn Ligon: Break It Down, Aspen Art Museum, CO (2025); All Over the Place, the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge, England (2024); Post-Noir, Carré d’Art, Nîmes, France (2022). Select curatorial projects include Grief and Grievance, the New Museum, New York (2021), and Blue Black, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, MO (2017). Ligon’s work has been shown in major international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (2015, 1997), Berlin Biennial (2014), Istanbul Biennial (2019, 2011), and Documenta XI (2002).

Alicia Hall Moran is a conceptual vocalist and musical creative based in New York City. Her third album, Coldblooded, released in June. Huey Copeland writes, “As ever in Hall Moran’s work, a range of musical styles, tones, and tempers are dynamically cross-wired and recombined. Her inimitable operatically-trained voice—at turns sly and simmering, sophisticated and soulful—unites her expansive aesthetic vision and places black female being at the heart of the modern world.”

LaFrae Sci is an award-winning multi-instrumentalist, composer, technologist, educator, and imaginationist whose work spans more than three decades and forty countries. Her practice is grounded in the idea that the blues is not only a musical language, but a technology for innovation, adaptation, and liberation. Working across Black experimental music, creative technology, and scientific inquiry, Sci explores the continuum between ancestral knowledge and Black futurist practice. She has designed groundbreaking music education programs throughout the United States and internationally, using sound as a vehicle for technological fluency and collective imagination. In 2020 Sci was appointed executive director of Willie Mae Rock Camp. Under her leadership, the organization has evolved from a seasonal rock camp into a year-round, tuition-free, STEM-informed creative music ecosystem serving hundreds of young people across New York City.

Studio Salon explores the dynamic intersections of literature and contemporary art through interdisciplinary discussions and experiences with writers, artists, and cultural leaders.