Senga Nengudi and Amanda Sroka with Jason Rosenfeld

Born in Chicago in 1943, Senga Nengudi lives and works in Colorado Springs. In the 1970s, Nengudi became a leading force within the emerging community of Black artists and musicians whose work engaged with the radical politics of the time through an abstract and dematerialized visual vocabulary. Her media-spanning oeuvre draws on a range of influences including free jazz and spoken word, Yoruba mythology, Japanese art and theater, Brazilian Constructivism, and African ritual. Characterized by experimentation with process, material, and form, Nengudi’s work challenges and reimagines the traditional narratives of Post-Minimalism and Conceptual Art, while reframing the broader histories of both feminism and the Black Power Movement.

Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art Amanda Sroka joined the museum in 2014 following the completion of her MA in Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London where her research focused on global conceptual art practices. Previously, she served as a curatorial assistant at the New Museum, New York. Recent projects at the Philadelphia Museum of Art include Martine Syms: Neural Swamp (2022); Senga Nengudi: Topologies (2021), Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas (2021); Fault Lines: Contemporary Abstraction by Artists from South Asia (2020), Marisa Merz (2019), Yael Bartana: And Europe Will Be Stunned (2018), among others. Forthcoming projects include solo projects with Zoe Leonard and Lawrence Abu Hamdan.

Distinguished Chair and Professor of Art History at Marymount Manhattan College Jason Rosenfeld, Ph.D., has curated the exhibitions John Everett Millais (Tate Britain, Van Gogh Museum), Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde (Tate Britain and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC), and River Crossings (Olana and Cedar Grove, Hudson and Catskill, New York). He is a co-author of the monograph Cecily Brown (Phaidon, 2020), and a Senior Writer and Editor-at-Large for the Brooklyn Rail.