Talk
Imani Brown and Bob Snead
MFA Fine Arts presents a talk by artists Imani Brown and Bob Snead.
Imani Jacqueline Brown is a New Orleans native, activist, cultural organizer, and director of programs at Antenna, New Orleans. In 2014, Imani co-founded Blights Out, a collective of citizens, artists, architects, and activists imagining a new model for development that generates art and action to impact issues of blight, gentrification and housing affordability. She is a member of Occupy Museums, an international artist/activist collective formed in 2011 during Occupy Wall Street to challenge and deconstruct the commodification of art and culture. Occupy Museums' project, Debtfair, will be featured in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. In 2014, Imani worked as curatorial associate and manager of publications for Prospect.3, New Orleans, under the artistic direction of Franklin Sirmans. That same year, her paper "Performing Bare Life: Occupying the Liminality between Civilizations" was named "best in stream" at the 5th Annual Latin American and European Meeting on Organization Studies in Havana, Cuba. She received her BA in visual arts and anthropology from Columbia University in 2010.
Bob Snead is a native of Charleston, South Carolina, where he founded Redux Contemporary Art Center in 2002 and remained founding director of the organization until 2005, when he left to pursue graduate studies at Yale University School of Art. After receiving his MFA in 2007, he helped form the traveling artist collective Transit Antenna and spent the next two years developing community based art projects across North America. Since 2010, he has lived and worked in New Orleans, continuing a rigorous studio practice, exhibiting across the US, while also assisting other artists in his role as Executive Director of Antenna (antenna.works). He is a founding organizer of the Platforms Fund as well Common Field, a national service organization for artist-centric organization. He was selected for the 2014 Artfields jury prize, and his work has been featured on the PBS series Art Assignment.
