Talk
Karyn Olivier
The Battle Is Joined, Monument Lab, Mural Arts, Public art commission, Vernon Park, Philadelphia, PA, 2017.
The Battle Is Joined, Monument Lab, Mural Arts, Public art commission, Vernon Park, Philadelphia, PA, 2017.
MFA Fine Arts presents a talk by Karyn Olivier.
Karyn Olivier, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago, creates sculptures, installations, and public art. In 2024 she participated in the Whitney Biennial (New York, NY), La Trienal at El Museo del Barrio (New York, NY), the Malta Biennale (Valleta, Malta), and Prospect.6 Triennial (New Orleans, LA). In 2025 Olivier will unveil another Philadelphia memorial, commemorating more than 5,000 African Americans buried at Bethel Burying Ground. This year, Olivier was chosen for the commission to create a public installation in downtown Milwaukee, memorializing Vel R. Phillips, the late politician, attorney, judge, and civil rights activist, to be unveiled in 2026. Last year Olivier presented her second solo show at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. In 2022 Olivier participated in Documenta 15 and installed a permanent commission for Newark Airport’s Terminal A.
Olivier has exhibited at the Gwangju and Busan biennials, the World Festival of Black Arts and Culture (Dakar, Senegal), The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Whitney Museum of Art, MoMA P.S.1, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Contemporary Art Museum Houston, The Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh), SculptureCenter (New York), ICA Watershed Boston, among others. Solo exhibitions include “Everything That’s Alive Moves” at Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia (2020), and “A Closer Look” at Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis (2007).
Olivier has received numerous awards, including the 2020 Anonymous Was a Woman Award, the 2018–2019 Nancy B. Negley Rome Prize, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, a 2019 PEW Fellowship, 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’s work has been reviewed in ArtForum, The New York Times, Time Out New York, The Village Voice, Art in America, Flash Art, Mousse, The Washington Post, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Frieze, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Hyperallergic, among others. She is a sculpture professor at Tyler School of Art and Architecture.
Talks is a series of lectures by artists, writers and scholars presented by MFA Fine Arts. Talks are held on Tuesdays at 3:00pm at 133 West 21st Street in Room 101C and on Zoom. Participation in the Q&A is limited to MFA Fine Arts students attending the lecture in person.
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