Keynote: 42nd Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series at The Newark Museum of Art

  • Date: February 19, 2022
  • Time: 9:00 am—2:00 pm
  • Location: Newark Museum of Art
  • Speakers
  • Moderator/s
    • Kamilah Forbes, Director & Producer – The Apollo Theater
    • Farah Jasmine Griffin, Chair of African-American & African Diaspora Studies; Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies and the William B. Ransford Professor of English & Comparative Literature and African-American Studies, Columbia University – Columbia University
    • Linda Harrison, Director and CEO – The Newark Museum of Art
    • Deborah Willis, University Professor, Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, Director of the Institute of African American Affairs/Center for Black Visual Culture – New York University

On the final day, the 42nd Annual Marion Thompson Wright Lecture will be held at the Newark Museum of Art, featuring keynote artists who all foreground the themes of play, utopia, and performances in their work. Conversations will take place from 9:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. and will include photographer Tyler Mitchell with Dr. Deborah Willis; visual artist Bisa Butler and Linda Harrison, the Director and the CEO of the Newark Museum of Art, and Grammy-award nominated jazz violinist Regina Carter in dialogue with renowned scholar Dr. Farah Jasmine Griffin, and playwright Dominique Morisseau in conversation with Kamilah Forbes, the Executive Producer of Apollo Theater.

The Annual Marion Thompson Wright Lecture (MTW) series was co-founded in 1981 by Clement A. Price, Giles R. Wright, and the MTW Study Club, who launched the series with the conviction that understanding the historical context of racism would aid in organizing struggles, building a beloved community and a better world. The conference is named in honor of East Orange native Marion Thompson Wright (1902–1962), the first black female to earn a history Ph.D.—the focus was on “The Education of Negroes in New Jersey” (Columbia University, 1941). Her research helped the NAACP overturn the “separate but equal” doctrine in “Brown v. Board of Education.” In her honor, the Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series brings outstanding thinkers and doers of African and African American life and history. The MTW series is diverse, civically engaged, and devoted to life-long learners.

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