This year’s Marion Thompson Wright Lecture Series entitled Curating Black America will feature Dr. Lonnie Bunch, inaugural Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture as the Marion Thompson Wright Lecturer. The event will use the opening of the NMAAHC in Washington D.C. to invite a wide-ranging discussion of the ways we remember the black experience and present it to a diverse and global audience.
Dr. Brunch will be joined by three other speakers that will explore black history and culture through their experiences leading several other premiere museums and historic sites:
- Robert Stanton, former director of the National Park Service
- Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem
- George McDaniel, Executive Director of the Drayton Hall Historic Site in Charleston, South Carolina
The 35th annual MTW conference will be presented Saturday, February 21, 2015, from 9:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. at the Paul Robeson Campus Center at Rutgers University-Newark, in memory of Institute director, Dr. Clement Price, who co-founded the series in 1981 with the late Giles R. Wright.
A special tribute to Dr. Price will begin after the lecture at 5 p.m. in the Newark Museum’s Billy Johnson auditorium. Invited speakers will participate in a moderated discussion about his work and contributions in the fields of public history, African American history, and the public humanities. They include:
- Pulitzer Prize-winning historians Taylor Branch and Annette Gordon-Reed (Harvard Law School)
- Spencer Crew, George Mason University; Johnnetta Cole, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art
- Nell Irvin Painter, artist and professor emerita, Princeton University
The lecture at Paul Robeson Campus Center at Rutgers University-Newark and events at the Newark Museum are free and open to the public. For more information, Please see the program announcement at the Rutgers University website.