Sir Isaac Julien’s Lessons of the Hour (2019) presents an immersive portrait of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who obtained freedom from chattel slavery in 1838 and became one of the most important orators, writers, and statespersons of the 19th century.
What is Douglass’s legacy today? How have his ideas shaped our understanding of democracy, equality, human rights, and justice? And how might those ideas speak to our current moment? Join a pair of monumental thinkers—Isaac Julien and civil rights leader and lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill—for a special conversation about Douglass’s continuing relevance. This event is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Isaac Julien: Lessons of the Hour, on view at MoMA May 19–September 28, 2024.
Sherrilyn Ifill is a MoMA Scholar in Residence. She is a renowned legal scholar and civil rights activist who for a decade led the nation’s premier civil-rights legal organization, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Her 2008 book On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 20th Century helped to lay the foundation for contemporary conversations about lynching and reparations. Since stepping down from the presidency of the LDF in 2022, Ifill has served as a senior fellow at the Ford Foundation and is completing the manuscript for a book titled Is This America?, to be published in 2024. She is the inaugural Vernon Jordan Endowed Chair in Civil Rights at Howard Law School, where she will launch the 14th Amendment Center for Law & Democracy in the fall of 2024.
Sir Isaac Julien is an artist and filmmaker who lives and works between London, England, and Santa Cruz, California. Since the 1980s, his practice has questioned the politics of masculinity, class, and race, and uses critical visual strategies to reimagine Black histories. His multi-screen film installations and photographs incorporate imagery that breaks down barriers between film, dance, photography, music, painting, and sculpture, combining these disciplines into kaleidoscopic narratives. He is a cofounder of the Isaac Julien Lab with his partner, Mark Nash, at the University of California Santa Cruz, where he is also a distinguished professor of the arts. Julien is the recipient of the Goslar Kaiserring Award (2022) and the Royal Academy of Arts Charles Wollaston Award (2017). He was made a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours 2017 and granted a knighthood as part of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Honours List in 2022. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including, most recently, a major retrospective at Tate Britain, London (2023).
The MoMA Scholar in Residence program is supported by the Ford Foundation. This program is organized in partnership with the Ford Foundation.