Cultural and Racial Legibility in Contemporary Abstraction

How are artists today addressing visual constructions of culture and race in ways that re-work the boundaries of abstraction, text, and figuration? What role in particular does the integration of abstraction with images from popular culture play in this process, and how does recognition, or on the other hand, misunderstanding of cultural icons operate in the current flow of information across the globe? How are the various histories of abstraction in America, in Africa, in Europe, or in Asia erased or re-invented in this type of contemporary art? Join the curator of the James Gallery, Katherine Carl, and a group of internationally distinguished artists as they consider these intriguing questions in relation to their own work and to that of others.