Time: 6:30 - 8:00 PM
Remarks at 7:15
Join us at the gallery for a conversation between Key Jo Lee, Chief of Curatorial Affairs & Public Programs at the Museum of the African Diaspora, and Nanci Amaka, interdisciplinary artist, writer, and lecturer, whose video work Windows from the series "Cleanse" is on view in the gallery's Media Room from July 26 to September 27.
Key Jo Lee is Chief of Curatorial Affairs and Public Programs at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco. She curated UNBOUND: Art, Blackness & the Universe, opening in October 2025, rooted in her essay “Gesturing Towards Infinitude” (Guggenheim, 2023). Formerly Associate Curator of American Art at The Cleveland Museum of Art, Lee has organized major exhibitions that expand how Blackness is seen and studied. She is the author of Perceptual Drift: Black Art and an Ethics of Looking and is currently completing her PhD in History of Art and African American Studies at Yale University.
Nanci Amaka is a Nigerian American interdisciplinary artist, writer, and lecturer living and working in Honolulu, Hawai‘i. Amaka received a BFA/BA in Visual Critical Studies from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an MFA from California College of the Arts. Her practice engages concepts surrounding memory, ancestry, mortality, and West African animism through performance, sculpture, painting, installations, video, and photography. Her work can be found in private collections globally, and has been exhibited internationally at various museums and galleries including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; International Center for Photography; Honolulu Museum of Art’s Doris Duke Theatre; Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History; Hawai‘i State Art Museum among others.
Born in Nigeria, Amaka spent her formative years in a rural rainforest village in southeastern Nigeria, immersed in her indigenous Igbo culture. She immigrated to the continental USA as an adolescent and has lived in various cities since, eventually moving to Honolulu, Hawai‘i where she currently lives with her husband and child.
