Join us as we kick-off MONUMENTS with a very special conversation with the exhibition’s curators Hamza Walker, Director of The Brick and MOCA Senior Curator, Bennett Simpson, moderated by historian and academic Robin D. G. Kelley.
Hamza Walker is the Director of The Brick, an independent nonprofit art space in Los Angeles. From 1994–2016, he was the Director of Education and Associate Curator at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, a non-collecting museum devoted to contemporary art.
Recently, Walker was a juror for the Venice Biennale’s prestigious Golden Lion award. In February 2019, Walker curated the talks and programs at the first edition of Frieze Los Angeles. In 2018 he curated Sperm Cult and Sol LeWitt: Page Works 1967 - 2007, an exhibition of works LeWitt made specifically for reproduction in magazines, journals and books.
In 2017 he co-curated Reconstitution at LAXART (now The Brick). Walker co-curated the Made in L.A. biennial at the Hammer Museum. Recent exhibitions include A Painting Is A Painting Isn't A Painting (2015) at the Kadist Foundation in San Francisco; Wadada Leo Smith, Ankhrasmation: The Language Scores 1967–2015, which he co-curated with John Corbett at the Renaissance Society; Teen Paranormal Romance (2014) and Suicide Narcissus (2013) two thematic group exhibitions both mounted at the Renaissance Society. He has contributed reviews and art criticism to Parkett, Artforum, and numerous catalogue essays. He is the recipient of the 1999 Norton Curatorial Grant and the 2004 Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement. In 2010 he was awarded the Ordway Prize for contributions to the field in the form of writing and exhibitions.
Bennett Simpson is co-curator of the MONUMENTS exhibition and Senior Curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), where he has worked since 2007. Among the many exhibitions he has organized or overseen at MOCA have been career-spanning surveys with artists Henry Taylor, Zoe Leonard, Laura Owens, R.H. Quaytman, William Pope.L, Mike Kelley, William Leavitt, and Dan Graham, as well as the critically-acclaimed thematic exhibition Blues for Smoke. He recently organized Henry Taylor: B Side, which premiered at MOCA before its presentation at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 2023, as well as Jennifer Packer: Every Shut Eye Ain’t Sleep (2021). Prior to MOCA, Simpson worked as a curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, where he organized exhibitions of work by Phillip-Lorca DiCorcia, Paul Chan, Sergio Vega, Roe Ethridge, Justine Kurland, and many other artists. Educated in literature and art history at the University of Virginia and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, Simpson has contributed to numerous publications and has taught or lectured at the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Southern California, Harvard University, and Rice University, among others.
Robin D. G. Kelley is Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Freedom Scholar Award. His books include the prize-winning Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (Free Press, 2009); Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon Press, 2002, new ed. 2022); Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (University of North Carolina Press, 1990, new ed. 2015); Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Beacon Press, 1997); Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (Free Press, 1994); Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (Harvard University Press, 2012); with Howard Zinn and Dana Frank, Three Strikes: The Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century (Beacon Press, 2001); Into the Fire: African Americans Since 1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
He is currently completing two books, Making a Killing: Cops, Capitalism, and the War on Black Life (Henry Holt, 2026) The Education of Ms. Grace Halsell: An Intimate History of the American Century (in progress, Henry Holt).
Kelley hosted the critically acclaimed podcast, Erroll Garner Uncovered, and has written liner notes for recordings by jazz legends and rising stars, including Thelonious Monk, Erroll Garner, Chick Corea, Randy Weston, Eric Dolphy, Jimmy Owens, Gil Scott-Heron, James Brandon Lewis, Aja Monet, Miles Okazaki, Teodross Avery, Asher Gamedze, Ben Wolfe, and Claire Daly.
