Vivian Browne and the Feminist Art Movement
Panel Discussion, Sold Out / Free / In-Person -- Limited standby: In-person requests only beginning at 5:30 pm in the admissions lobby on the day of the program. This event takes place during Third Thursday, with free admission from 5-8 pm.
Join us for an engaging conversation on Black feminist art and the legacy of Vivian Browne. Moderated by Adrienne L. Childs, co-curator of Vivian Browne: My Kind of Protest, this panel will feature curator Valerie Cassel Oliver, artists robin holder and Janet Olivia Henry whose works were included in Progressions: A Cultural Legacy, an exhibition curated by Vivian Browne at MoMA PS1 in 1986. This public dialogue will explore the Black feminist art scene and critically examine Vivian Browne’s artistic contributions and her place within this vital cultural movement.
IMAGE: Vivian Browne in her studio with Little Men and Africa Series, 1974, Photo: Jeanie Black
Janet Olivia Henry (b. 1947; East Harlem, New York) is an artist and educator who lives and works in Jamaica, Queens. She was educated at the School of Visual Arts and the Fashion Institute of Technology and received a fellowship in education from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In partnership with filmmaker Linda Goode Bryant, Henry designed and produced Black Currant, a magazine highlighting the experimental work of artists showcased at Just Above Midtown (JAM). She was a member of the Women’s Action Coalition (WAC), a feminist open alliance that sought to address issues of women’s rights through direct action. She participated in WAC’s drum corps and currently co-leads a Project EATS drumming group. Henry is a life-long educator and has worked at the New York State Council on the Arts, the Studio Museum in Harlem’s education department, the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, the Lower Eastside Girls Club, the Children’s Art Carnival, and the Brooklyn Heights Montessori School.
Henry has presented solo and two-artist exhibitions at Gordon Robichaux, New York; STARS, Los Angeles; Hollybush Gardens, London (two-artist with Cynthia Hawkins); P·P·O·W Gallery, New York; Just Above Midtown (JAM), New York; Lower Eastside Girls Club Community Gallery, New York; Cedar Crest College, Allentown, PA (curated by Cynthia Hawkins); John Jay College, New York; Hallswalls, Buffalo, NY (curated by Sara Kellner); Pulse Art, New York; Seventh Second Photo Gallery, New York (curated by Wendy Tiefenbacher); Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Staten Island, NY (curated by Olivia Georgia); Public Art Fund’s Messages to the Public, New York; Basement Workshop, New York; and The Exhibitions Gallery, Jamaica, NY. Henry’s work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions including at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; New Museum, New York; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; California African American Museum, Los Angeles; Queens Museum, New York; Newark Museum, NJ; Matthew Marks Gallery, New York; a. SQUIRE, London; Candice Madey, New York; A.I.R Gallery, New York; and Artists Space, New York.
Her work has been reviewed and featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, ARTnews, Hyperallergic, Flash Art, Frieze, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, and Smithsonian Magazine, and BOMB among others. Henry’s work is held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Dorsky Museum at the State University of New York, New Paltz, NY; and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
Robin Holder (born 1952) is a contemporary American visual artist and activist. holder is known for her mixed-media printmaking and paintings which focus on themes of spiritual and racial identity, class, social justice, and personal experience. robin holder was commissioned to create several site-specific public art installations throughout the Northeastern United States, including New York City and New Jersey. A number of her two-dimensional works can be found in several collections, including the Library of Congress, the Washington State Arts Commission, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. robin has been involved in visual arts education for over forty years as an artist in residence, a mentor, program and curricula developer, funding panelist, consultant and grant writer for various cultural and educational institutions. https://www.facebook.com/
Valerie Cassel Oliver has served as the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts since 2017. Her 2018 debut exhibition at the museum was the 50-year survey of work by Howardena Pindell. The traveling exhibition, Howardena Pindell: What Remains to be Seen, was co-organized with Naomi Beckwith and named one of the most influential of the decade. Cassel Oliver subsequently organized Cosmologies from the Tree of Life, an exhibition featuring over thirty newly acquired works from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation. Most recently, she curated the critically acclaimed exhibition The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse. The sweeping survey was honored as one of the best exhibitions of 2021 and traveled to venues across the US through January 2023.
Prior to the VMFA, Cassel Oliver served as the Senior Curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) from 2000 to 2017, where she organized numerous exhibitions including the acclaimed Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970 (2005), Cinema Remixed & Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image Since 1970 with Dr. Andrea Barnwell Brownlee (2009), and Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art
(2012). She has also mounted significant survey exhibitions for Benjamin Patterson, Donald Moffett, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Jennie C. Jones, Angel Otero, and Annabeth Rosen.
Cassel Oliver was the director of the Visiting Artist Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1995–2000) and a program specialist at the National Endowment for the Arts (1988–1995). In 2000, she was appointed one of six curators to organize the Biennial for the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
Cassel Oliver is the recipient of a Getty Curatorial Research Fellowship (2007), a fellowship from the Center of Curatorial Leadership (2009), the High Museum of Art’s David C. Driskell Award (2011), the Arthur and Carol Kaufman Goldberg Foundation-to-Life Fellowship at Hunter College (2016), the James A. Porter Book Award from Howard University (2018), and the Detroit Institute of Art’s Alain Locke International Art Award (2022). From 2016 to 2017,she was a Senior Fellow in Curatorial Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and, in spring 2020, she served with Hamza Walker as a Fellow for Viewpoints at the University of Texas at Austin.
Cassel Oliver holds an Executive MBA from Columbia University, New York; an MA in art history from Howard University in Washington, DC, and a BS in communications from the University of Texas at Austin.
