HESSE FLATOW
On the occasion of her solo exhibition go-slow, Adama Delphien Fawundu will sit down with Dr. Joan Morgan and Uchenna Itam and discuss her practice.
Dr. Joan Morgan is the Program Director of the Center for Black Visual Culture at New York University. She is an award-winning cultural critic, feminist author, Grammy nominated songwriter and a pioneering hip-hop journalist. Morgan coined the term “hip-hop feminism” in 1999, when she published the groundbreaking book, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down which is taught at universities globally. Regarded internationally as an expert on the topics of hip-hop, race and gender, Morgan has made numerous television, radio and film appearances, including “On the Record”, “Ladies First”, “Surviving R. Kelly” and “Hair Tales”. She written for numerous publications including The New York Times, Allure and British Vogue and the author of She Begat This: Twenty Years of the Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Dr. Morgan has been a mentor for Unlock Her Potential and serves on the Board of Trustees for the National YoungArts Foundation. Jamaican born and South Bronx bred, Dr. Morgan is a proud native New Yorker.
Uchenna Itam specializes in the visual art of people of African descent in the United States. She holds a B.A. in the History of Art from the University of Pennsylvania, a M.A. in the Humanities from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in Art History from The University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include diaspora studies, critical race art history, feminist theory, and sonic aesthetics. Itam’s current project, titled Feeling Visible, examines how politics of identity and issues of representation are negotiated through multisensorial aesthetics in the installation art practices of Janine Antoni, Nadine Robinson, and Wangechi Mutu at the turn of the twenty-first century. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from The University of Texas at Austin, Samuel H. Kress Foundation, CCL/ Mellon Foundation, the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Association of Print Scholars/ Getty Foundation. Her writing has appeared in publications such as The Routledge Companion to African Diaspora Art History (2024), Modern Drama (2017) and Pass Carry Hold (The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2024). An established curator, Itam founded the curatorial collective INGZ (2014-2018), which presented exhibitions with TJ Dedeaux-Norris, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Mimi Cherono Ng’ok among others. More recently, she acted as Curator of the Henry Luce Foundation African American Collecting Initiative at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (2020-2021).
