Shared Imaginings: Social Sculpture Panel Discussion
Saturday, May 17
2:00 – 3:00 PM
For All Ages
FREE! Optional RSVP
Featuring curator Carey Lovelace and artists Matthew Lopéz-Jensen and Bayeté Ross Smith, this panel discussion is part of the larger event, Shared Imagings at the Museum, an afternoon of activities exploring Social Sculpture—art that seeks to create positive societal change and engage audiences in the creative process. The practice of Social Sculpture informs many of the projects currently on view at The Bronx Museum in the exhibition WORKING KNOWLEDGE: Shared Imaginings, New Futures.
Left to Right: Portrait of Carey Lovelace, Photo by Pedro Alejandro Hernandez. Portrait of Matthew Lopéz-Jensen. Portrait of Bayeté Ross Smith, Photo by Christopher Michel.
About Carey Lovelace
Carey Lovelace is a writer, critic, curator, activist, theatre-maker, and producer, who originally trained as a composer of avant-garde music.
Active in social causes, she is the Founder of Visions2030, a cross-disciplinary collective platform, harnessing the artistic imagination to create new models of society, creating future-oriented gatherings with an international focus. She received a Visionary Pathmakers Award from The Bronx Museum of the Arts.
As curator, she was Co-Commissioner of the U.S. Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale, featuring Sarah Sze, among other exhibitions. She has written on contemporary visual art for publications including Artforum, Art in America, and The New York Times. From 2003-7, she was Co-President of the AICA/USA, the nation’s largest organization of art critics.
As a playwright, she has had over 50 performances of her plays at venues including the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, New York’s Ensemble Studio Theatre, and REDCAT in Los Angeles. She is a member of the BMI Librettists workshop and the Actors Studio Playwrights/Directors workshop. Lovelace is Executive Creative Director of New York-based Loose Change Productions, dedicated to transnational, transcultural productions.
A a 2010 Andrew and Marian Heiskell Visiting Critic at the American Academy of Rome, she has a BFA in ethnomusicology and composition from Cal Arts, an MA in journalism from NYU, and an MFA in playwrighting from the Actors Studio/New School, studying music composition under James Tenney at California Institute of the Arts and Iannis Xenakis at the University de Paris 1; cultural reporting under Margo Jefferson at NYU; playwrighting under Curt Dempster at Ensemble Studio Theatre – among others!
Previously, she worked as a creative technologist at Google’s Creative Lab, where she contributed to projects ranging from machine learning on fingertip-scale hardware to creative direction for the Google for Africa campaign, and generative AI research strategy.
Across all mediums, her work is rooted in a poetics of logic, embodied research, and the protection of complexity.
About Matthew Lopéz-Jensen
Matthew López-Jensen is a Bronx-based interdisciplinary artist whose rigorous explorations of landscape combine walking, photography, mapping, and social practice. His projects investigate the relationships between people and local landscapes. He was a recent artist-in-residence with the NYC Urban Field Station, is a Citizen Pruner, community gardener, and part of the New York City Urban Forest Task Force.
López-Jensen teaches environmental art and photography at Parsons School of Design at The New School and at Fordham University. He is a Guggenheim Fellow in photography and his work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Gallery of Art and the Brooklyn Museum, among other institutions. He received his MFA from the University of Connecticut and BA from Rice University.
He is Columbia Law School’s inaugural Artist-In-Residence, a Presidential Leadership Scholar, a TED Speaker, a Creative Capital Awardee, a CatchLight Global Fellow, an Art For Justice Fund Grantee Partner, a BPMPlus Grantee, and a POV NY Times embedded mediamaker.
His work is in the collections of The Smithsonian Institution, the Oakland Museum of California, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and The Brooklyn Museum. He has exhibited internationally with the Centre de la Photographie Mougins (France), PhotoSaintGermain (France), Musée Delacroix (France), the Goethe Institute (Ghana), Foto Museum (Belgium), the Lianzhou Foto Festival (China), with the U.S. Department of State in South Africa, and America House in (Ukraine), among others. His work has been featured at Lincoln Center, the Sheffield Doc Fest, the March on Washington Film Festival and the L.A. Film Festival. His collaborative projects “Along The Way” and “Question Bridge: Black Males” have shown at the 2008 and 2012 Sundance Film Festival, respectively.
He has created public art projects with the Apollo Theater, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Paris Photo Festival, the Photo Saint Germain Festival, Spot 24, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, Dysturb, the City of White Plains NY, The Lenfest Center for the Arts at Columbia, NE Sculpture, The Laundromat Project, the NYC Parks Department, San Francisco District Attorney’s Office, the California Judicial Council. His work has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic Learning, PBS, Facing History & Ourselves, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Charlotte Observer, and the Columbia Law School Scholarship Archive, in addition to books such as Dis:Integration: The Splintering of Black America (2010) and Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present (2009).
In addition to his creative work in art and media, Bayeté is a board member of Project Implicit at Harvard , The Brothers Network advisory board, and Self Evident Education.