An annual lecture on serious issues in contemporary art, supported by the Sandra Garrard Memorial Fund.
Please join us on November 6th at 6 pm for the 2025 Sandra Garrard Memorial Lecture by Teju Cole.
TEJU COLE is a novelist, essayist, and photographer. He was the photography critic of the New York Times Magazine from 2015 until 2019. He is currently the Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard and a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine. His most recent book is the novel Tremor (2023), named a book of the year by Time, the Washington Post, New York Magazine, the Times (UK), and the Financial Times, among others. It was shortlisted for the National Critics Circle Book Award, and was awarded the 2024 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction. The Department of Africana Studies at Tulane University has selected Tremor as the subject of this semester’s Black Studies Book Club. The Black Studies Book Club Discussion will take place on Friday, Nov 7, 2025, 11:30 am–1:00 pm. Lunch is included. Space is limited. Please RSVP for the discussion.
Previous speakers:
Amanda Williams, November 14, 2024
Garrard Lecture by Amanda Williams
November 14, 6 pm
Freeman Auditorium
Woldenberg Art Center, Tulane University
Amanda Williams is a visual artist who trained as an architect. Her creative practice employs color as an operative means for drawing attention to the complex ways race informs how we assign value to the spaces we occupy. Williams’ installations, sculptures, paintings, and works on paper seek to inspire new ways of looking at the familiar and, in the process, raise questions about the inequitable state of urban space and ownership in America.
Williams received a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University. She has exhibited at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; among others. She serves on the board of the Terra Foundation Collective. Williams is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow with work in several permanent collections, including MoMA, NY, MCA Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, and the Smithsonian. Her breakthrough series Coler(ed) Theory has been named by the New York Times as one of the 25 most significant works of postwar architecture in the world.
Hugh Hayden: American Dream September 26, 2023
Jennifer Sichel: Criticism without Authority: Gene Swenson and Jill Johnston’s Queer Practices Sandra Garrard Memorial Lecture Friday, April 21, 2023
Tying, Publicizing, Adorning: the Buttons of Toussant Louverture Anne Lafont, Professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, December 7, 2022
Catherine Opie April 21, 2022
Posing Modernity: A Retrospective View and Implications for Art History Denise Murrell, Associate Curator of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York | Thursday March 18, 2021
Experimentations in Art and Science, Revealing the Oddness of Nature Mónica Bello, Curator and Head of Arts at CERN | Thursday, March 12, 2020
Earthly Delights, by Casey Reas | Thursday, February 7, 2019
Darby English: "Differing, Drawn: Pope.L’s Skin Set Drawings" | Monday, February 26, 2018
Conversation with Mickalene Thomas | Mickalene Thomas with Dr. Mia Bagneris, Assistant Professor, History of Art | January 18, 2017
Jenni Sorkin: Material Decisions: Women, Process, and Form | Sandra Garrard Memorial Lecture | Thursday, January 26, 2017
Hank Willis Thomas: The Truth is I Love You | Sandra Garrard Memorial Lecture | Thursday, March 23, 2017
Kerry James Marshall: Mastry | Helen Molesworth, Chief Curator, The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles | Thursday, April 6, 2017
Arlene Shechet November 17, 2016
Frames Edge: An Artist’s Talk by Jessica Stockholder September 19, 2013
Crisscrossing the World: Los Angeles Artists and the Global Imagination March 21, 2013
Kellie Jones, Associate Professor, Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University
Criticism: Take it Personally April 19, 2012
Lecture by Holland Cotter, chief art critic at the New York Times
An Artist’s Talk by Nicola López March 16, 2012
Working in the Moment: an artist’s talk by Jon F. Clark November 10, 2011
Blow-Up, Photography, and the Last Days of Truth in Art November 18, 2010
Lecture by Marcia E. Vetrocq, editor of Art in America
Swoon: the artist discusses her work November 3, 2010
Robert Storr: The Art of Sufficiency After a Time of Excess April 15, 2010
Lisa Yuskavage: A Lecture March 10, 2009
Waterfalls and More: a lecture by artist Pat Steir November 2, 2008
Deep Content: How Art Means and Means and Means April 4, 2007
Lecture by art critic Jerry Saltz
A lecture by artist Paul Chan November 16, 2006
Why Can’t You See: Lecture by Mel Chin February 23, 2005
On Maritime Space April 14, 2004
Lecture by Allan Sekula, California Institute of the Arts
To Draw a Line: Lecture by Janine Antoni 2001
A lecture by Lari Pittman 2000
What Art Does October 10, 1998
Lecture by David Hickey
Symposium on Abstract Expressionism February 8, 1998
Irving Sandler, Ann Gibson, Anne Wagner, Amelia Jones
A lecture by Dr. Douglas Crimp October 27, 1995
A lecture by William T. Wiley October 27, 1994
Hollywood, Depression, and High Art: the collapse of Avant-Garde models of art and the myth of the artist September 23, 1993
Lecture by Dr. Donald Kuspit
A Survey and the Making of Sculpture November 12, 1992
Lecture by Nancy Graves
The Legacy of Jackson Pollock, 1945-1970 October 2, 1991
Lecture by Kirk Varnedoe
A lecture by Roy DeForest September 27, 1990
A lecture by Eunice Lipton
Contemporary Art and the Contemporary Museum: Match or Mismatch September 28, 1988
Lecture by Thomas Krens, Director, Solomin R. Guggenheim Museum
A Woman Artist’s Journey September 28, 1987
Lecture by Miriam Schapiro
Art and Money September 15, 1986
Lecture by Robert Hughes
A lecture by Philip Pearlstein