Panelists are Dan Borelli of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and

artists Titus Kaphar and Karyn Olivier

SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY (February 20, 2018) — On Monday, February 26, 2018, at 6:00 p.m., the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery’s Curator-at-Large Isolde Brielmaier will moderate a discussion about the role of memory and monuments within the current American discourse. The conversation will engage contemporary artists Titus Kaphar, Karyn Olivier, and Dan Borelli in an animated conversation that will touch on recent debates about the preservation of monuments of historic figures and the tactics taken by the panelist artists to reclaim public space.

Additional information on the panelists is available below.

The event is free and open to the public. For more information, call the Tang Visitors Services Desk at 518-580-8080 or visit http://tang.skidmore.edu.

About the Guest Speakers

Dan Borelli is an artist and Director of Exhibitions at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. In 2010, as part of his master studies at the GSD, he started an art-based research inquiry into the Nyanza Superfund Site in his hometown, Ashland, Massachusetts. His project makes public hidden narratives of cancer clusters, human loss, activism, and ultimately regeneration. With the support of Harvard Innovation Learning Technology, ArtPlace America, and NEA Our Town grants, he created an exhibition at the town’s public library that housed the EPA’s field repository on the site, a streetlighting intervention to illuminate the groundwater contamination below the town today, and a permanent public space, The Ashland Memorial Healing Garden.

Titus Kaphar is an artist whose work interacts with the history of art by appropriating its styles and mediums through painting and sculpture, and then altering the work in a nod to hidden narratives and unspoken truths about the nature of history. Kaphar received an MFA from the Yale School of Art and has received the Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Fellowship. His work has been exhibited at Savannah College of Art and Design, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Seattle Art Museum. His work is included in the collections of the New Britain Museum of American Art, the Seattle Art Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art. He has been awarded the 2015 Creative Capital Fellowship and the 2016 Artist as Activist Rauschenberg Foundation Fellowship. Kaphar was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut.

Karyn Olivier is a sculptor and installation artist. In 2017, Olivier installed a large-scale commissioned work for Philadelphia’s Mural Arts program in historic Vernon Park. In 2015, Olivier created public works for Creative Time in Central Park and NYC’s Percent for Art program. Her work has been exhibited at the Gwangju and Busan Biennials, World Festival of Black Arts and Culture (Dakar, Senegal), The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Whitney Museum of Art, MoMA P.S.1, among others. She is the recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, the New York Foundation for the Arts Award, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, the William H. Johnson Prize, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award, a Creative Capital Foundation grant, and a Harpo Foundation grant. Olivier was born in Trinidad and Tobago, earned her MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art and her B.A at Dartmouth College, and is an associate professor and program head of sculpture at Tyler School of Art.

About the Accelerator Series

The Accelerator Series is the Tang Teaching Museum’s dynamic conversation series on big ideas and big issues that seeks to find new entry points into discussions that veer from traditional paths. As an open and inclusive public forum for dialogue, exchange, and questioning, the Accelerator Series ignites a collective sense of intellectual curiosity and fosters thoughtful engagement with a deeper understanding of compelling issues that have the potential to spark radical transformations.

The series features key cultural influencers from the arts and culture sector as well as academia, entertainment, government, journalism, media, politics, and beyond, who present new perspectives and disrupt the status quo by encouraging a “getting comfortable with discomfort” attitude to think and work through big ideas to drive change.

The Accelerator Series is supported by Accelerate: Access and Inclusion at the Tang Teaching Museum, a project of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

About the Tang Teaching Museum

The Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College is a pioneer of interdisciplinary exploration and learning. A cultural anchor of New York’s Capital Region, the institution’s approach has become a model for university art museums across the country-with exhibition programs and series that bring together the visual and performing arts with fields of study as disparate as history, astronomy, and physics. The Tang has one of the most rigorous faculty-engagement initiatives in the nation, the Mellon Seminar, and robust publication and touring exhibition initiatives that extend the institution’s reach far beyond its walls. The Tang Teaching Museum’s building, designed by architect Antoine Predock, serves as a visual metaphor for the convergence of ideas and exchange the institution catalyzes. The museum is open from noon to 5:00 p.m. on Tuesday through Sunday, with extended hours until 9:00 p.m. on Thursday, and is closed on Mondays and holidays. More information at tang.skidmore.edu.