La Tanya Autry on Art and Activism

La Tanya Autry joins Tom Thurston on this episode of Slavery and Its Legacies to discuss Art and Activism.

La Tanya S. Autry is the inaugural Curator of Art and Civil Rights at Mississippi Museum of Art and Tougaloo College. During her fellowship at Yale University Art Gallery, she curated the national touring exhibition “Let Us March On: Lee Friedlander and the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom”, that features photography of a groundbreaking civil rights demonstration. Through her graduate studies at University of Delaware, where she is completing her Ph.D. in art history, La Tanya has developed expertise in art of the United States, photography, and museums. In her dissertation “The Crossroads of Commemoration: Lynching Landscapes in America”, which analyzes how individuals and communities memorialize lynching violence in the built environment, she concentrates on the interplay of race, representation, memory, and public space. Additionally, La Tanya advocates for racial justice through the arts. She is the co-founder of The Art of Black Dissent, an interactive dialogue and community-centered art program that centers on twentieth and twenty-first century visual culture of the African-American liberation struggle.

“Slavery and Its Legacies” is available on iTunes and SoundCloud. Email comments and suggestions to gilder.lehrman.center@yale.edu with subject line “podcast.”