Voices in Contemporary Art Talk with Lucy Kim

About this event

Boston University College of Fine Arts School of Visual Arts and Voices in Contemporary Art (VoCA) present a conversation with artist and Associate Professor of Art and Chair of Graduate Studies in Painting Lucy Kim and conservator Narayan Khandekar at the Howard Thurman Center for Common Ground. They will discuss Kim’s work across painting, sculpture, and biological media. The conversation will be followed by an audience Q&A and casual reception.

Lucy Kim is a visual artist working across painting, sculpture and biological media. In her hybrid works, she embraces distortion as a tool to deconstruct how we see what we see: the relationship between our evolved vision-centricity, constructed socio-cultural systems, and personal desires. Kim is a recipient of the 2026 Wagner Arts Fellowship, 2024 Howard Foundation Fellowship, and the 2017 ICA Boston James and Audrey Foster Prize. In 2022, she received the Creative Capital Award for her project printing images with bacteria that has been genetically-modified to produce melanin. Melanin is the main bio-pigment behind human skin, hair, and eye color. She began this project while an artist-in-residence at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and continues to develop it at Boston University, where she teaches. Through this project, Kim expands her committed study of our visual habits, which she first began in her sculptural paintings using unconventional processes in the studio. Kim is based in Cambridge, MA and is Associate Professor of Art at Boston University.

Narayan Khandekar is the Director of the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies at the Harvard Art Museums, and Lecturer on the History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University. He received a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Melbourne and a Post-graduate Diploma in the Conservation of Easel Paintings from the Courtauld Institute of Art. He is an author on over seventy publications.

VoCA (Voices in Contemporary Art) is a non-profit organization that generates critical dialogue and collaborative programming around the stewardship of contemporary art. VoCA Talks is a series of public programs featuring artists and their collaborators in conversation about the challenges and rewards inherent in making, showing, and preserving contemporary art.

This program is free and open to the public, but we ask that you please RSVP.