This is a free event open to the public. 

Simon Benjamin is a Jamaican artist and filmmaker living in New York, whose work includes experiential installations, video, painting and sculpture.

Through research, oral history, and critical fabulation, he calls attention to the contradictions entangled in the enduring myths and images of the Caribbean as tropical paradise - a carefully constructed imaginary that replaced the harsh reality of the exploitative plantation. With the intention of moving beyond critique and pointing to systems and power - he creates open-ended poetic and lyrical moving images and objects, which bring together the immaterial and the tactile. Rethinking the relationship of margin to center in archival representation, vernacular materials, such as cornmeal and fish traps, become sculptural elements, embedding multiple temporalities and narratives.

Brooke Minto is Executive Director and CEO of the Columbus Museum of Art (CMA). With a career spanning over two decades, Minto has experience working for a range of museums and interdisciplinary arts organizations in the United States and abroad. 

Before joining CMA, Minto served as the inaugural executive director of the Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums (BTA). During her time with BTA, she grew the grant-funded pilot program into a robust nonprofit membership organization equipping Black trustees with the resources to bring meaningful and lasting change to their institutions. In 2023, Minto was recognized by the American Alliance for Museums (AAM) for her work advancing diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion (DEAI) in the museum field. 

Leslie M. Wilson is Academic Curator and Director of Research Programs at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her research, teaching, and curatorial work focus on the history of photography, the arts of Africa and the African diaspora, modern and contemporary American art, and museum studies. She was a co-curator of David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive (Art Institute of Chicago, Fundación MAPFRE, and Yale University Art Gallery, 2023-2025), and the curator of The True America: Photographs by Ernest Cole for the Aperture Foundation (Minneapolis Institute of Art and MICA, 2025) and not all realisms: photography, Africa, and the long 1960s (Smart Museum of Art, 2023).

She has recently written for publications including Jamel Shabazz: Albums and the Brooklyn Museum of Art's Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art.