How We See Us: Black Artists in Conversation

Please join Glendale Library, Arts & Culture for a exciting online event as we welcome moderator Cameron Shaw (Deputy Director and Chief Curator, California African American Museum), April Bey (artist and arts educator), and Victor Yates (artist and poet) for an engaging panel discussion of Black artists in celebration of Black History Month.

In Shaw’s work as the Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the CAAM in Los Angeles, she guides the curatorial and education departments, as well as marketing and communications. Previously, she cofounded and served as the executive director of Pelican Bomb, a nonprofit contemporary art organization based in New Orleans, which offers a forum for exhibitions, public programs, and arts journalism. Her writing on the history of Black art and image practices has been published in The New York Times, Art in America, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. She received the prestigious Creative Capital Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Art in America Writing Fellowship.

April Bey, originally from The Bahamas, currently lives and works in Los Angeles as a visual artist and arts educator. Bey’s interdisciplinary artwork is an introspective and social critique of American and Bahamian culture, feminism, generational theory, social media, AfroFuturism, AfroSurrealism, post-colonialism, and constructs of race within supremacist systems. Her work has been shown in the CAAM, The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, The Center for Contemporary Printmaking, and more. She has also exhibited internationally in The Bahamas, Italy, Spain, and West Africa. Bey is both a practicing contemporary artist and art educator, currently a tenured professor at Glendale Community College.

Victor Yates is a writer, poet, and arts educator, who has received such awards as The Los Angeles Press George Floyd Award for Poetry, the City of West Hollywood Artful Distancing Grant, the Judith A. Markowitz Emerging LGBT Writers Award, Lamda Literary Award, and the Stonewall Book Award–Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award. He is a published author and freelance journalist in Los Angeles.

This panel discussion is generously sponsored by the Glendale Arts and Culture Commission through funding from the Urban Art Program.

Please register here to attend this engaging virtual panel discussion. We hope to see you there!