Fall 2025 Series
Darby English / Tuesday, September 30
Oluremi Onabanjo / Tuesday, November 4
Janine Antoni / Tuesday, November 18
Darby English:
Why Join This World?
Tuesday, September 30
Fred Lazarus IV Center Auditorium
4:30 pm
Darby English is the Carl Darling Buck Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago, where he teaches courses in cultural studies and modern and contemporary art. English joined Chicago’s faculty in 2003 and received the University’s Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the nation’s oldest such prize, in 2010. From 2014 to 2020, English was Adjunct Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. At MoMA, English’s projects involved collection and acquisitions research. This work culminated in Among Others: Blackness at MoMA (2019), an acclaimed book conceived and co-edited with Charlotte Barat.
English’s single-authored books include Charles Ray: Adam and Eve (Gregory R. Miller and Co., 2024), To Describe a Life: Notes from the Intersection of Art and Race Terror (Yale, 2019), 1971: A Year in the Life of Color (University of Chicago, 2016), and How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (MIT, 2007). Currently his primary research concerns Noah Purifoy (b. 1917, d. 2004), whose manifold commitment to “De-Mystify the Art Process” took shape during the August 1965 Watts Rebellion in Los Angeles. Essays currently in development and varying in length look at the problem of environment in Veronica Ryan’s sculpture; the black/white modality in Ellsworth Kelly’s painting; Pope.L’s Robert Ryman; and, hazards of ‘beholding.’
Oluremi C. Onabanjo
Tuesday, November 4
Fred Lazarus IV Center Auditorium
Time to be announced
(Image Credit: S*an D. Henry-Smith)
Oluremi C. Onabanjo is The Peter Schub Curator of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, where she manages MoMA's holdings of over 35,000 photographs spanning the history of the medium. Her recent exhibitions and collaborations include Ernest Cole's House of Bondage, Projects: Ming Smith, and New Photography 2023. Currently on view is A Little Gallery of the Photo-Secession and New Photography 2025.
Onabanjo was the inaugural recipient of the Vilcek Prize in Curatorial Work (2025) and a 2024 Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellow. She sits on the Photography Advisory Board of the Istanbul Modern and is a core member of the C-MAP Africa Research Group. She is the author of Ming Smith: Invisible Man, Somewhere Everywhere and the editor of Marilyn Nance: Last Day in Lagos. Onabanjo holds a PhD in Art History from Columbia University.
Janine Antoni
Tuesday, November 18
Fred Lazarus IV Center Auditorium
Time to be announced
Janine Antoni received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and earned her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1989. She is known for her unusual processes, using her body as both a tool and a source of meaning within the conceptual framework of her practice. Antoni’s early methods involved transforming unique materials such as chocolate and soap through habitual, everyday processes like bathing, eating and sleeping to create sculptural works and installations. By way of her body of work, Antoni carefully articulates her relationship to the world, giving rise to emotional states that are felt in and through the senses. In each piece, no matter the medium or image, a conveyed physicality is meant to speak directly to the viewer’s body.
Her work shows nationally and internationally. Antoni has exhibited at numerous major institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; The Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland; Magazsin 3 Handelshögskolan, Stockholm, Sweden; Hayward Gallery, London, UK; and Sammlung Goetz, Munich, Germany. She has also been represented in several international biennials and festivals such as the Whitney Biennial, New York, NY; Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy; Johannesburg Biennale, Johannesburg, South Africa; Gwangju Biennial, Gwangju, South Korea; Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey; S.I.T.E. Santa Fe Biennial, Santa Fe, NM; Project 1 Biennial, New Orleans, LA; Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi, India; and documenta14, at the Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany. In 2016, Antoni collaborated with Anna Halprin and Stephen Petronio on Ally, an exhibition presented by The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, with major support from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. In 2019, Antoni collaborated again with Halprin, presenting a major solo exhibition, Paper Dance, at The Contemporary Austin, Texas. The same year, Antoni was the first artist in residence at The Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, for which she was commissioned to do a series of events including presenting a new body of work, I am fertile ground in the cemetery’s catacombs. In 2024, Antoni had a solo show titled In my holding at Rossi & Rossi, Hong Kong. Most recently, Antoni was commissioned by The City of Coral Gables to make a public artwork located on Miracle Mile.