Exhibition “Americans in Paris”
Join acclaimed writer, Adam Shatz, for a conversation with Lynn Gumpert, director of the Grey Art Museum, that centers on American expat novelist William Gardner Smith’s The Stone Face (1963) at La Maison Française at NYU. Reprinted in 2021, Smith’s work exposes the complexity of postwar Paris as both a haven for Black Americans fleeing racism in the U.S. and a stage for colonial violence such as the police massacre of peaceful Algerian protestors in 1961. The discussion will focus on the community of Black American writers, artists, and intellectuals who experienced the politics of exile in Algerian War-era Paris.
Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962 at the Grey Art Museum is the first major exhibition to examine the historical impact of the expatriate art scene in Paris after World War II and delves into the various circles of artists who made France their home during an era of intense geopolitical realignment. This international loan exhibition showcases more than 130 works by approximately 70 artists, providing a fresh perspective on a moment of creative ferment too often overshadowed by the contemporaneous ascendancy of the New York City art scene.
Adam Shatz is the US editor of The London Review of Books and a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and other publications. He is a visiting professor at Bard College, and the host of the podcast “Myself with Others.” Shatz is the author of three books: Prophets Outcast: A Century of Dissident Jewish Writing about Zionism and Israel (Nation Books); Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination (Verso); and The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon (FSG).
Lynn Gumpert has been director of the Grey Art Museum, New York University’s fine arts museum, since 1997. Among the more than 75 exhibitions she has overseen at the Grey are Modernisms: Iranian, Turkish, and Indian Highlights from NYU’s Abby Weed Grey Collection (2019); The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal (2018); and Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952–1965 (2017). In 1999, she was made Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.
Time: 7:30 pm EST
Free!
