Join artist Anna Campbell and curator of the Degrees of Archive exhibition Amy L. Powell for a conversation tracing throughlines in Campbell’s work and research methods. Topics may include the relationships between archival research and making sculpture and video, Campbell’s exquisite titles for their complex bodies of work—including “dream sequence” as a generative theme—and their works in process with vernacular and university archives. What happens when He-Man is submitted to artificial intelligence, revealing the interface’s gender imaginary and limitations?
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Anna Campbell is an artist, designer, and professor based in Teejop/ Madison, Wisconsin, and Lenapehoking/ New York City. Campbell’s sculptures, installations, video, and ephemera mine queer history and desire. Using material metaphors evoked through scaffold, found objects, and digitally fabricated forms, they construct immersive, exploded diagrams for queer and feminist histories that might have existed. Their ephemera, or prefigurative merch, often marks fabulated sites, and creates rhizomatic and itinerant installations that insist on intimate engagement and the dailyness of queer survival. Their archival work ranges from site-specific installations to oral history-driven video installation.
Their solo exhibitions have been on view at Participant, Inc in New York, Ruschwoman Gallery in Chicago, BOSI Contemporary in New York, Tractionarts in Los Angeles, and the Window Into Houston at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, Texas. Their work has been shown in group exhibitions at Seoul National University of Science and Technology, AIR Gallery in Brooklyn, Gallery 400 in Chicago, and the Green Gallery at Yale University.
Campbell’s work has been featured in the Brooklyn Rail’s New Social Environment, the New Art Examiner, Queer Holdings: A Survey of the Leslie-Lohman Collection (Hirmer, 2019) as well as in the Advocate.com, Hyperallergic, GQ.com, the Chicago Reader, and in “Hip openers: on the visuals of gendering athleticism” by Erica Rand, published in Queer Difficulties in Verse and Visual Culture, edited by Jongwoo Jeremy Kim and Christopher Reed (Routledge, 2017). They have been in residence at FIAR (Fire Island Artist Residency), ACRE (Artists’ Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions), Ox-Bow, the Vermont Studio Center, and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. Campbell’s work is in the collections of numerous universities as well as the Leslie Lohman Museum, the MoMA Library, the Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and their site-specific, bronze sculpture is permanently installed at the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn.
Presented in conjunction with Degrees of Archive: contemporary art and the shape of history on view at Krannert Art Museum (February 4–July 3, 2027).
This event is supported by the Frances P. Rohlen Fund and the School of Art & Design Visitor Series. Krannert Art Museum acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council.
