Silver Eye

Join artists, scholars, researchers, and community members for a day of conversations on Friday, March 7 exploring the work and themes presented in The Archive as Liberation. To help facilitate meaningful conversation the symposium will be capped at 30 participants.

10.00: Coffee and welcome remarks from Leo Hsu and Aaron Turner

Visitors are encouraged to explore the exhibition during morning coffee.

10.20-11.00 Panel 1: Empathy and the archive

Archives shape our understanding of the past and influence how we imagine the future. Aware of this power, how do the artists featured in this exhibition engage with archives to craft powerful counter-narratives against history and/or nurture and steward their own? How can the archive be a tool for liberation? How can empathy guide new ways of seeing? This panel represents a multiplicity of dialogues, concerns, approaches, visual expression, and representation. When or how does multiplicity intersect with empathy?

11.00-11.10 Break

11.15-12.00 Panel 2: Archives of media, and transformation

Artists in this exhibition including Raymond Thompson Jr, Andre Bradley, and Savannah Wood create works in which media, history, and lived experience co-exist. If news is created in the public sphere, how can it be recontextualized to create liberating alternative narratives? How can personal histories and genealogies be extracted and reclaimed in this context?

12.00-12.45: Lunch generously sponsored by ShadoBeni

1.00-1.45 Panel 3: Archives of technology, and care

calista lyon's work expresses personal and societal levels of grief and loss in terms of extraction and destruction of the land. Harrison D. Walker’s work explores the advancement of technologies in abstract ways that nevertheless draw upon early childhood memories and his lived experiences. What is the relationship between technology and personal narrative? How do both artists interrogate and/or critique technology to elevate human stories? How does the archive address the global and personal?

1.55-2.15pm Unfinished stories: closing remarks

The Archive as Liberation exhibition and symposium is produced with sponsorship support from Duolingo.

Image credit: calista lyon, A Precolonial Image Against a Postcolonial Landscape, 2025