Rujeko Hockley (Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art) in conversation with novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge and historian Kerri Greenidge.
Kaitlyn Greenidge’s debut novel, We Love You, Charlie Freeman (Algonquin Books), was one of the New York Times Critics’ Top 10 Books of 2016 and was a finalist for the Center For Fiction’s First Novel Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award and winner of the Forward Fiction Prize. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Elle.com, Buzzfeed, the Believer, Glamour Magazine and other places. She is a contributing editor for Lenny Letter and a recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Literature and a 2016 Whiting Award. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Kerri Greenidge received her Doctorate in American Studies from Boston University, where her specialty included African-American history, American political history, and African-American and African diasporic literature in the post-emancipation and early modern era. Her research explores the role of African-American literature in the creation of radical Black political consciousness, particularly as it relates to local elections and Democratic populism during the Progressive Era. As a historian for Boston African American National Historical Site in Boston, through which she published her first book, Boston Abolitionists (2006). Her forthcoming book is a biography of African-American activist, William Monroe Trotter, which explores the history of racial thought and African American political radicalism in New England at the turn of the century. She teaches at Tufts University where she is currently co-director of the Tufts / African American Freedom Trail Project, and where she directs the American Studies Program through the University’s Consortium of Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora.
Rujeko Hockley is an assistant curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is the co-curator of the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Additional projects at the Whitney include Toyin Ojih Odutola: To Wander Determined (2017) and An Incomplete History of Protest: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1940-2017 (2017). Previously, she was Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum, where she co-curated Crossing Brooklyn: Art from Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Beyond (2014) and was involved in exhibitions highlighting the permanent collection as well as artists LaToya Ruby Frazier, The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Kehinde Wiley, Tom Sachs, and others. She is the co-curator of We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85 (2017), which originated at the Brooklyn Museum and is traveling to three U.S. venues in 2017-18. She serves on the Board of Art Matters, as well as the Advisory Board of Recess.