Leo Amino: The Visible and the Invisible | On Race and Abstraction

Sunday, September 15 at 3:00 PM | MoMA PS1

Speakers (bios at bottom of page):
Thomas Lax
Aruna d’Souza
Che Gossett
Lumi Tan
Eunsong Kim
Anni Pullagura
Genji Amino

Copies of Leo Amino: The Visible and the Invisible will be available for purchase on site.

This event is first come, first served; no RSVP needed.

Thomas (T.) Jean Lax is a curator and writer specializing in black art, queer study and performance. At the Museum of Modern Art, they organized the exhibition Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces (2022) about the gallery, founded by Linda Goode Bryant in 1974 where “blackness existed in the presence of black folks rather than in the absence of whiteness.” In 2019, Thomas worked with colleagues across MoMA on a major rehang of its collection, celebrated as an “integrated presence of difference itself”; in 2018, Thomas co-organized the exhibition Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done with Ana Janevski and Martha Joseph, historicizing the emergence of postmodern dance in the early 1960s within avant-garde jazz, high camp, and eco-critical improvisations. Thomas’s other collaboratively-organized exhibitions include the Projects Series for emerging artists; Unfinished Conversations, inspired by the cultural theorist Stuart Hall; and the contemporary art survey exhibition, Greater New York. Previously, they worked at The Studio Museum in Harlem for seven years organizing When The Stars Begin To Fall: Imagination and the American Southand participating in the landmark “f show” contemporary art series.

Aruna D'Souza writes about modern and contemporary art; intersectional feminisms and other forms of politics; and how museums shape our views of each other and the world. Her work appears regularly in 4Columns.org, where she is a member of the editorial advisory board, and she is a contributor to The New York Times. Her writing has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, CNN.com, Art News, Garage, Bookforum, Frieze, Momus, Art in America, and Art Practical, among other places, as well as in numerous artist’s monographs and museum exhibition catalogues. Her book, Whitewalling: Art, Race, and Protest in 3 Acts (Badlands Unlimited), was named one of the best art books of 2018 by the New York Times. Recent editorial project include Linda Nochlin’s Making It Modern: Essays on the Art of the Now (Thames & Hudson, 2022) and Lorraine O’Grady’s Writing in Space 1973-2018 (Duke University Press, 2020); she co-curated the retrospective of O’Grady’s work, Both/And, that opened in March 2021 at the Brooklyn Museum. She is the recipient of the 2021 Rabkin Prize for art journalism and a 2019 Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant, and delivered the Distinguished Critics Lecture for AICA (the International Association of Art Critics) in 2019. She was appointed the Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor at the National Gallery of Art in 2022, and the W.W. Corcoran Professor of Social Engagement at the Corcoran School of Art, George Washington University, in 2022-2023.

Che Gossett is a writer. They are currently the associate director of the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer and Transgender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Che is an alum of the Whitney Independent Study Program. With queer art historian David Getsy, Che co-edited a syllabus on trans and non binary methods for Art Journal which just recently received the 2022 CAA Art Journal Award. In May 2024, Che published an article on blackness and ecology in the work of John Akomfrah for Transition journal, a publication of the Harvard University Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Finally, Che is currently co-editing a special issue of Social Text journal with professor Tavia Nyong’o on Caribbean philosopher Sylvia Wynter, culture, and technics.

Lumi Tan is a curator and writer based in New York City. She is the curator for the upcoming 2026 Converge45 citywide exhibition in Portland, Oregon and the curator for Frieze Focus New York. She recently served as the Curatorial Director of Luna Luna, a revival of the world’s first art amusement park created by André Heller in 1987 and exhibited in Los Angeles in 2024. Previously, she was Senior Curator at The Kitchen, New York, where she organized exhibitions and produced performances with artists including Kevin Beasley, Meriem Bennani, Gretchen Bender, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Autumn Knight, Moor Mother, Sondra Perry, The Racial Imaginary Institute, Tina Satter, Kenneth Tam, Danh Vo, and Anicka Yi. Tan has also held positions at the Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain Nord Pas-de-Calais, France; Zach Feuer Gallery, New York; and MoMA/P.S.1, New York. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Artforum, Frieze, Mousse, Cura, and numerous exhibition catalogues. She was the recipient of 2020 VIA Art Fund Curatorial Fellowship, and has been visiting faculty at School of Visual Arts, New York, Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and Yale School of Art.

Eunsong Kim is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Northeastern University. Her practice spans: literary studies, critical digital studies, poetics, translation, visual culture and critical race & ethnic studies. Her writings have appeared in: Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, and in the book anthologies, Deep Fakes from the Algorithm’s & Society series, Poetics of Social Engagement and Reading Modernism with Machines. Her academic monograph, The Politics of Collecting: Race & the Aestheticization of Property (Duke University Press 2024) materializes the histories of immaterialism by examining the rise of US museums, avant-garde forms, digitization, and neoliberal aesthetics, to consider how race and property become foundational to modern artistic institutions. She is the recipient of the Ford Foundation Fellowship, a grant from the Andy Warhol Art Writers Program, and Yale’s Poynter Fellowship.

Anni A. Pullagura, PhD, is a scholar and curator of American art. She is currently based in New Haven, CT, where she is the recipient of the inaugural postdoctoral research fellowship for modern and contemporary curators. As assistant curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, she organized the exhibitions Hew Locke: The Procession (co-curated with Ruth Erickson); 2023 James and Audrey Foster Prize; Jordan Nassar: Fantasy and Truth; Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca: Swinguerra; The Worlds We Make: Selections from the ICA Collection; and i'm yours: Encounters with Art in in Our Times (co-curated with Eva Respini, Ruth Erickson, and Jeffrey De Blois). She has assisted on the organization of several national and international exhibitions and publications, including Simone Leigh; Simone Leigh: Sovereignty for the United States Pavilion, 59th Venice Biennale; Deana Lawson; A Place for Me: Figurative Painting Now; and Revival: Materials and Monumental Forms. She currently serves on the Art of the Americas Advisory Think Tank for the Harvard Art Museums, on the steering committee for the Asian Network at Yale as co-chair of the Wellbeing Subcommittee at Yale University, as well as in working groups for accessibility, equity, and online collections at the Yale Center for British Art

Genji Amino is a writer and curator based in New York. Recent curatorial projects include No Monument: In the Wake of the Japanese American Incarceration (The Noguchi Museum, 2022), Dead Lecturer / distant relative: Notes from the Woodshed 1950-1980 (The Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University, 2022), and Leo Amino: Work with Material (The Black Mountain College Museum, 2023). Current critical projects include Leo Amino: The Visible and the Invisible (Radius Books and The Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, 2024), and a consideration of transparency and Asian American aesthetic form forthcoming in Ruth Asawa: Retrospective (Museum of Modern Art, 2025). They hold an MFA from the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College, and are a PhD Candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.