Fall 2025 Series
Darby English / Tuesday, September 30
Oluremi Onabanjo / Tuesday, November 4
Janine Antoni / Tuesday, November 11
Darby English
Tuesday, September 30
Fred Lazarus IV Center Auditorium
Time to be announced
Darby English is the Carl Darling Buck Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago. 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. He is associate faculty in both the University’s Department of Visual Arts and its Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture. From 2014 to 2020, English was Adjunct Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. English’s projects at MoMA concerned collection and acquisitions research, culminating in Among Others: Blackness at MoMA, conceived and co-edited with Charlotte Barat.
English’s teaching and advising address subjects in cultural studies as well as modern and contemporary American and European art produced since the First World War. His current research centers on Noah Purifoy (1917-2004), whose manifold commitment to “De-Mystify the Art Process” took shape during the August 1965 Watts Rebellion in Los Angeles. Also nearing completion is a short book, entitled “Uptake,” on ego, otherness, and habit (‘method’) in intellectual work with art; its argument grows from reflections on teaching in both art history and studio settings; pandemic alienations; and the world-work engaged art writing might seek to do.
Oluremi C. Onabanjo
Tuesday, November 4
Fred Lazarus IV Center Auditorium
Time to be announced
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. Recent exhibitions include Ernest Cole's House of Bondage, Projects: Ming Smith, and New Photography 2023. Currently on view is Visual Vernaculars.
The inaugural recipient of the Vilcek Prize in Curatorial Work, Onabanjo was a 2024 Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellow, and the 2023 recipient of the Cisneros Institute Research Grant. She is a core member of the C-MAP Africa Research Group and sits on the Photography Advisory Board for the Istanbul Modern.
A 2020 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grantee, Onabanjo is the editor of Marilyn Nance: Last Day in Lagos (2022) and author of Ming Smith: Invisible Man, Somewhere, Everywhere (2023). She holds a PhD in Art History and a BA in African Studies from Columbia University, and an MSc in Visual, Material, and Museum Anthropology from Oxford University.
Janine Antoni
Tuesday, November 11
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.