This roundtable discussion convenes the cocurators of A Movement in Every Direction, Jessica Bell Brown and Ryan N. Dennis, and artists Torkwase Dyson and Carrie Mae Weems. Moderated by Anthony Graham, BAMPFA Senior Curator, the program offers reflections on the exhibition, from its planning and development to the impact of its ongoing national tour.

About the Speakers

Jessica Bell Brown is Curator and Department Head for Contemporary Art at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Recent projects include How Do We Know the World?, Stephanie Syjuco: Vanishing Point (Overlay), and Thaddeus Mosley: Forest. She has worked at Gracie Mansion Conservancy, Creative Time, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and she was the 2016–17 Museum Research Consortium Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Ryan N. Dennis is Senior Curator and Director of Public Initiatives at the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, and formerly Chief Curator and Artistic Director of the Center for Art & Public Exchange at the Mississippi Museum of Art. Recent projects include The Art of Collective Care for Black Mothers, a residency project by Shani Peters organized with the local Jackson, Mississippi, community; Betye Saar: Call and Response; and Piercing the Inner Wall: The Art of Dusti Bonge. Dennis was cocurator of the 2021 Texas Biennial.

Carrie Mae Weems lives and works in Syracuse, New York, where she is Artist in Residence at Syracuse University. She examines issues of race, class, and gender identity, working primarily in photography and video, while also exploring everything from verse to performance. Her central focus is on looking at history as a way to better understand the present. In 2013 Weems was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow.

Torkwase Dyson, based in New York, works in multiple mediums. Describing herself as a painter whose forms address the continuity of ecology, infrastructure, and architecture, she investigates our connections to imagination, materiality, geography, and belonging. In 2016 Dyson was elected to the board of the Architectural League of New York as Vice President of Visual Arts.