Online Conversations: Artist Lecture with Adrian L. Burrell
Friday, March 29
Image: From Sugarcane and Lightning page spread. © Adrian L. Burrell. Courtesy of the artist.
An artist lecture with Adrian L. Burrell on the occasion of his newly released monograph Sugarcane and Lightning. Presenting an overview of his multidisciplinary practice and excerpts from the development of Sugarcane and Lightning, Adrian will speak on his relationship to archival inquiry and the mapping of familial histories. The presentation is followed by an open Q&A.
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Adrian L. Burrell employs multiple modalities of imagery and storytelling to, in his words, “create a visual meditation on my family's untold history. Reinterpreting and archiving these histories creates a space for collective memory to challenge erasure, and explore the knowledge that Black kinship networks reveal.”
Burrell, who grew up surrounded by three generations of his family in Oakland, California, worked with an investigative genealogist while researching his family’s experiences in Louisiana, and tracing further to their origins in West Africa. His monograph combines his writing, photographs and footage with found letters and personal correspondence, pages from family albums, and stills from home videos, making fluid geographies and collapsing time.
Adrian L. Burrell was born in Oakland California in 1990. He is a third-generation Oakland artist utilizing photography, film, installation and experimental media. His work examines issues of race, class, and intergenerational dynamics, inviting moments where collective storytelling can be a site for remembering. Burrell has lived and worked on four continents. He is a US Marine Corps veteran, and a graduate of San Francisco Art Institute (BFA, film) and Stanford University (MFA, Department of Art & Art History). At Stanford he lectured, served as the Black Graduate Student Community Outreach Chair, and was a visiting artist with Stanford's Institute for Diversity in the Arts.