CVA Lecture Series: Alex Callender, School of Art Faculty

“Disentangling the Interwoven Relations of Race, Gender, and Capitalism”

Alex Callender works in drawing, painting, and installation to trace and remap historical materials as a means to explore with both criticality and care, how we disentangle the interwoven relations of race, gender, and capitalism. Drawing largely from archival sources her work engages with mythic and residual forms of coloniality to think about ways that we orient ourselves to the past. Using different visual modes of annotation, hybrid narratives, and speculative storytelling, she recontextualizes static (or seemingly fixed) renderings of history to consider their relationship to social forces like scale, time, and memory. Callender has had solo shows at Northeastern University’s Gallery 360, NYU Gallatin Galleries (NY), the Rubber Factory (NY), Michigan State University’s LookOut Gallery, and a public work commissioned by the UMass Amherst University Museum of Contemporary Art. Alex has held residencies with the MacDowell Colony, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Swing Space program, The Drawing Center’s Open Session program, Urban Glass, the Santa Fe Art Institute, Alice Yard in Trinidad, and DRAWinternational and The BAU Institute in France. Raised in New York City, she now lives in Western Massachusetts where she is an Associate Professor of Art at Smith College.