Member Lecture: Project a Black Planet—The Art and Culture of Panafrica

Antawan I. Byrd is associate curator of photography and media at the Art Institute, an assistant professor of art history at Northwestern University, and a faculty affiliate of Northwestern’s Program of African Studies. Byrd recently co-edited the Art Institute of Chicago Field Guide to Photography and Media (2023) and curated Mimi Cherono Ng’ok: Closer to the Earth, Closer to My Own Body (2021). He co-curated The People Shall Govern: Medu Art Ensemble and the Anti-Apartheid Poster (2019). The publication for the latter, which Byrd co-edited, was ranked among the “Best Art Books of 2020” by the New York Times. Byrd was a curator for the second edition of the Lagos Biennial of Contemporary Art (2019) and an associate curator for the tenth edition of the Bamako Encounters, Biennial of African Photography (2015).

Adom Getachew is professor of Political Science and Race, Diaspora & Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. She is a political theorist with research interests in the history of political thought, theories of race and empire, and postcolonial political theory. Her work focuses on the intellectual and political histories of Africa and the Caribbean. She is the author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (2019) and co-editor, with Jennifer Pitts, of W. E. B. Du Bois: International Thought (2022). She is currently working on a second book on the intellectual origins and political practices of Garveyism—the black nationalist/pan-African movement, which had its height in the 1920s. Her public writing has appeared in Dissent, Foreign Affairs, the London Review of Books, the Nation, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times. 

Elvira Dyangani Ose has been the director of the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) since September 2021. Previously, she was director of The Showroom, London. She sits on the advisory council of the Tate Modern and is a member of the Thought Council of the Fondazione Prada, where she has curated numerous projects, including: Theaster Gates: True Value; Nástio Mosquito: T.T.T. Template Temples of Tenacity; and Betye Saar: Uneasy Dancer.

Dyangani Ose was curator of the eighth Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, (GIBCA 2015) and curator of International Art at the Tate Modern (2011–14). Her curatorial projects address the narration of history as a collective experience, the way in which public space is intervened, and the recovery of non-Western narratives and epistemologies. Ose completed doctoral studies at Cornell University, New York, has a master’s in the Theory and History of Architecture from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, and a degree in Art History from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

Matthew S. Witkovsky is the Richard and Ellen Sandor Chair and Curator, Photography and Media, and vice president for strategic art initiatives. Highlights among the many exhibitions he’s curated since joining the Art Institute in 2009 include Revoliutsiia! Demonstratsiia! Soviet Art Put to the Test (2017); Moholy-Nagy: Future Present (2016); and Sophie Calle: Because—The Blind (2022). In 2016 he received the Kraszna-Krausz Award for Provoke: Photography in Japan between Protest and Performance. Previously, Matthew was a curatorial associate and associate curator of photography at the National Gallery of Art, where he received his first Kraszna-Krausz Award for Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918–1948 (2008). He holds a Ph.D from the University of Pennsylvania.