This program continues a series of artists’ conversations focused on the thematic threads of the exhibition Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection.

Featuring artists whose work is included in the exhibition, the discussion explores the innovative ways artists have transformed the language of painting as technologies evolve.

Artist Barbara Kasten, whose work is featured in Making Their Mark, will be joined in conversation with Jamillah James, Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Gloria Sutton, Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History and New Media at Northeastern University and catalogue contributor for Making Their Mark.

Jamillah James is Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Previously, she was Senior Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA) and co-curator (with Margot Norton) of Soft Water Hard Stone, the 2021 New Museum Triennial at the New Museum, New York. She has held curatorial positions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Queens Museum, New York; and independently curated numerous exhibitions and programs at alternative and artist-run spaces throughout the US and Canada. She has contributed to Artforum, Frieze, Art in America, The International Review of African American Art and numerous institutional exhibition catalogues and is an editor of the new reprint edition of Charles Gaines and Catherine Lord's Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism (Dancing Foxes Press/DAP, 2024).

Barbara Kasten is an American visual artist whose work is featured in Making Their Mark. After initially studying painting, Kasten studied textiles with fellow Making Their Mark artist Trude Guermonprez at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. Since the early 1970s, Kasten has explored the potentials and technologies of the photographic medium across her practice, from the Photogenic Painting series featured in the exhibition to later experiments with silkscreen printing and other processes that reveal the technological dimensions of painting and photography.

Gloria Sutton is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History and New Media at Northeastern University. Her scholarship analyzes the ways durational media have shaped the reception of visual art since the 1960s. She received her doctorate from the University of California Los Angeles and has been a fellow at the Getty Research Institute. She is a contributor to the Making Their Mark catalogue, and is the author of The Experience Machine: Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie Drome and Expanded Cinema, editor of the first volume on the photographic and sculptural work of Sara VanDerBeek. Sutton is finalizing the manuscript for her latest monograph, Pattern Recognition: Contemporary Art in the Age of AI.