BOOK TALK | Debi Cornwall: Model Citizens
Join the Institute for Public Knowledge on December 4th at 5:30 PM for a book talk with Debi Cornwall, author of Model Citizens. The last in a trilogy of books on the American condition, Model Citizens considers the United States as a case study into a global phenomenon: How have staging, performance, and roleplay come to inform thinking about citizenship in a violent land whose people no longer agree on what is true? During the event, Cornwall will screen her work-in-progress short film, This is (Not) a Drill. She will be in discussion with Joan Kee and Cresa Pugh. This program is co-sponsored by the Grey Art Museum.
Learn more and RSVP here.
Debi Cornwall is a multimedia documentary artist who returned to visual expression after a twelve-year career as a civil-rights lawyer. Marrying dark humor, rigorous research, and structural critique, she uses still and moving images, testimony, and archival material to examine the staging and performance of American power and identity. In 2023, Debi became the first American and first woman to be awarded the Prix Elysée, a biennial juried contemporary photography prize created by Photo Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland, to complete and publish Model Citizens. Following Welcome to Camp America: Inside Guantánamo Bay (Radius, 2017) and Necessary Fictions (Radius, 2020), Model Citizens is the last in a trilogy of photobooks about the American condition in the post-9/11 era. The project launched as a 2024 book in English (Radius Books) and French editions (Citoyens Modèles, Éditions Textuel), and as an installation including her genre-defying found-footage short, Pineland/Hollywood, at the Rencontres d’Arles festival in France. Honors also include a NYSCA Individual Artist Grant in film, a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in photography, and a Leica Women Foto Project Award. Her work has been profiled in publications including Art in America, European Photography Magazine, British Journal of Photography, Photograph, Le Monde, and Hyperallergic, and is held in public and private collections around the world. A graduate of Brown University and Harvard Law School, and faculty member at the ICP, Debi lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Joan Kee is the Judy and Michael Steinhardt Director and Professor of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU as well as an Affiliated Faculty member of NYU Law School. A specialist in modern and contemporary art and a former attorney, her books include Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post Sixties America (University of California Press, 2019). She also guest-edited a special issue of Law and Literature in 2021 on contemporary art and law in a global context. The introduction to this issue is among the most read essays in the journal’s history. Kee is a contributing editor to Artforum and an editor-at-large for the Brooklyn Rail who has written and spoken frequently on the intersection of art and many areas of the law, including on various manifestations of national security laws in Hong Kong and South Korea. She is also honored to have been Debi’s classmate at Harvard Law School.
Dr. Cresa Pugh is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at The New School in New York City. Her research sits at the intersection of historical transnational sociology, postcolonial social theory, and critical museum studies, with a focus on the cultural, political, and economic implications of colonial-era artifact looting and contemporary movements for restitution. Central to her work is an examination of how cultural artifacts looted during colonial conquest continue to sustain imperial racial capitalism and global racial hierarchies. Her research and publications contribute to broader discussions on racial justice, reparative justice, and cultural sovereignty, with a particular emphasis on how cultural expressions and movements can serve as powerful tools for resistance and societal transformation. Dr. Pugh’s current book project, Guardians of Beautiful Things: The Politics of Postcolonial Cultural Theft, Restitution, Refusal, and Repair, critically engages with the contested history of the Benin Bronzes and ongoing struggles over their restitution. She explores how these artifacts, held in Western museums, serve as symbols of historical injustice while simultaneously functioning as tools of cultural imperialism and political power. Her broader research addresses the ways in which these objects shape contemporary global hierarchies and the persistence of colonial legacies. In addition to her work on restitution, Dr. Pugh is developing a second book project, Fela Kuti and the Postcolonial African Imagination, which examines anti-colonial and decolonial thought in postcolonial Africa through the life and activism of Nigerian Afrobeat musician Fela Kuti. Her interdisciplinary approach brings together African socialist thought, cultural heritage studies, and the role of political resistance in shaping postcolonial identities. Dr. Pugh holds a BA in Anthropology and Religion from Bates College, an MSc in Migration Studies from the University of Oxford, and an MA and PhD in Sociology and Social Policy from Harvard University.