Join us for a conversation with Vanessa Charlot and Brianna Chandler as part of our On Protest and Mourning virtual Dialogue Series. On Protest and Mourning, our current digital exhibition, is a gathering of photographers and filmmakers whose work reveals how as a community, a nation, and a diaspora we grapple with anger, loss, and grief in response to the ongoing state violence and police brutality perpetrated against Black bodies. Their poignant and timely work helps us to navigate the questions: While we engage in protest and uprising, how can we also mark the lives that have been irreparably damaged or lost? How do we create rituals and make spaces for mourning?

Vanessa Charlot will speak about Am I Next?—part of her ongoing documentary series to capture both the Black Lives Matter movement and everyday life in St. Louis, Missouri. Through images of a generation of men long steeped in the soundtrack of protest and the poetics of mourning and caught in an arduous, unending procession of grief, Charlot’s work illuminates the larger generational impact of racial injustice upon the Black male body in America. Charlot will be in conversation with Brianna Chandler, youth activist and organizer from St. Louis, Missouri who works with Sunrise St. Louis, a youth-led organization focused on Black and indigenous liberation. The conversation will be hosted by Grace Aneiza Ali, curator of On Protest and Mourning. 

Vanessa Charlot is a documentary photographer living and working between St. Louis, Missouri and Miami, Florida. She shoots primarily in black and white to explore the immutability of the collective human experience and to disrupt compositional hierarchy. Her work focuses on the intersectionality of spirituality, socio-economic issues and sexual/gender expression. She has worked as a freelance photographer and lecturer throughout the US, Caribbean and Southeast Asia. Her photographs have been commissioned by Vogue, The New Yorker, Oprah Magazine, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, Buzzfeed, Artnet News among other national and international publications. She currently serves as a teaching artist for the International Center of Photography in New York.

Brianna Chandler is a youth activist from St. Louis, Missouri who organizes with Sunrise St. Louis, a youth-led organization focused on Black and indigenous liberation and with her campus’s abolitionist collective, WU for Abolition. Chandler is currently a sophomore at Washington University in St. Louis, majoring in American Culture Studies and minoring in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. During the uprisings last summer she amassed a platform on Instagram where she shares content centered around political education. Chandler has been featured in The New York Times and Rolling Stone Magazine for activism work. Most importantly, she considers herself a lifelong student of all the radicals and revolutionaries who came before her. 

Guyanese-American Grace Aneiza Ali serves as Curator-at-Large for the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute in New York. She is an Assistant Professor and Provost Fellow in the Department of Art & Public Policy at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. Ali’s curatorial research and teaching practice centers on curatorial activism, socially engaged art practices, global contemporary art, and art of the Caribbean Diaspora with a focus on her homeland Guyana. Ali is the editor of the recent publication, Liminal Spaces: Migration and Women of the Guyanese Diaspora (Open Book Publishers, Cambridge, UK).