Helen Molesworth, guest exhibition curator for the MCA Chicago and chief curator of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, discusses the political and aesthetic urgency of the 1980s with participating artists Lorraine O’Grady and Donald Moffett. An artist and critic, O’Grady has engaged in performance, installation, and text-based works since 1980 that explore ideas of diaspora, hybridity, and black female subjectivity. A celebrated painter, Moffett was deeply involved in AIDS activism as a member of Act Up and the art collective Gran Fury in the ’80s.
Presented in conjunction with the exhibition This Will Have Been: Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s, a major new survey of art from an era when the political sphere was dominated by the ideas of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher; the music scene was transformed by punk, MTV, and the birth of hip-hop; and our everyday lives were radically altered by a host of technological developments, from the Sony Walkman and the ATM to the first personal computers.
