SJSU Art Galleries Tuesday Night Lecture: Mary Graham

In her lecture, Call To Face – Portraiture and Melody As Tools to Unify Mary WD Graham will discuss how her work in painting, vocal performance and sculpture evokes “the ancestors” and our collective human origins as means of providing insight into our history, our interiorities, and our present conditions. Graham will cover the evolution of her career so far and the progression of several bodies of work; her early paintings, Portraits of My Ancestors which explored memorialization and memory; Serenade, an experimental performance series utilizing improvised, operatic melodies to spark shared experiences of beauty; Kin, an installation of sculptural portraits; and her most recent body of work, Value Test: Brown Paper, a series of fictional oil portraits of Black women meditating upon colorism and the “paper bag test” in order to question the legacy of color based hierarchy.

This lecture is supported by the College of Humanities & the Arts’ Artistic Excellence Programming Grant.