Zoom Room
Mon
Oct 4, 2021
11:00 pm
 - 
12:15 am
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About

MoAD’s physical building may be closed due to the mandatory shelter-in-place, but you can still get your fill of art and artists of the African Diaspora. Twice monthly, join MoAD staff members as we visit some of our favorite artists in their studios to see what they’re currently working on and how their work is changing as a result of the quarantine. This is a rare opportunity to hear from artists directly from their studios. We will follow all talks with an audience Q&A.

April Banks is an artist, educated as an architect. Her creative career has straddled conceptual art, social practice and exhibition design. Her interdisciplinary work sits between photography, installation, and collaborative experiments.

Recent projects time travel through historical archives and memories, questioning what we think we know of the past and how it informs our cultural positioning systems. She questions how history is told, who claims the authority to write it and how it endures over time? This most recent exploration began at the gap of a fuzzily conclusive ancestral DNA test and has now grown to include the unidentified, generically described, the altered, and the intentionally forgotten.

This work is a kind of historical fiction that reveals the fictions in history. In pursuit of joy, yet often enraged, her work usually begins with a question.

April’s work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Daytona Beach, New Hampshire, Maryland, New York, Switzerland, Colombia, Brazil, United Arab Emirates, Senegal and Ethiopia. In February 2021 she completed her first permanent public art sculpture “A Resurrection in Four Stanzas” in Santa Monica, CA.

Generous support for this series provided by the Westridge Foundation.

Funding has been provided by California Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as part of the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.

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