Crystal Z Campbell named 2023–24 Freund Fellow 

Multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer Crystal Z Campbell has been named the Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow at Washington University’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts for the 2023–24 academic year. 

In its 37th year, the annual Freund Fellowship involves teaching an art course at the school, giving a public lecture, and exhibiting work as part of a solo exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum in fall 2024.  

Campbell’s creative research centers public secrets and the underloved, reflected in an archive-driven practice. Informed by rumor and anti-institutional forms of historical transmission alongside gaps in archival repositories and recorded histories, Campbell’s work lends attention to events, places, and people that have been underacknowledged. Campbell’s works on Henrietta Lacks—a Black woman whose cells were taken without consent and became the backbone of the biotech industry via the first immortal cell line—reflect Campbell’s interest in the intersections of perception and the optics of historical transmission. Intrigued by whispers, epigenetics, social and spatial histories, and embodiment as an archival form, Campbell is most known for time-based installations that combine archival traces, strategic opacity, abstraction, and the architectural and site histories of each location. 

Campbell will spend a semester in St. Louis teaching a class of their own design, titled “Artists in the Archive.” They’ll take the class to various archives throughout St. Louis—such as those at the Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri Historical Society, and WashU—and use what they find as a jumping off point for artworks. “I’m excited for our students to learn what the archive can be for them, that they can go in and hold items in their own hands; that it can be an inspirational source,” said Amy Hauft, director of the College and Graduate School of Art.   

Additionally, Campbell will have an artist studio in Weil Hall, working alongside with current MFA students. “It’s a great model for our students to see someone in the studio, to see that steadiness, as they produce a museum show,” Hauft said.  

The artist’s exhibition proposal focuses on the Exodusters, the first groups of freed Black people who made a westward exodus from states along the Mississippi River following the Civil War and predating the Great Migration. The proposal is an extension of Campbell’s recently mounted solo exhibition at Artist Space with their latest experimental film, REVOLVER. Narrated by a descendant of Exodusters, Campbell describes the film as “an archive of pareidolia,” a term used to describe seeing a pattern or image of something that isn’t there. Hauft noted that one of Campbell’s previous projects centered on Tulsa and the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, and that coming to St. Louis and highlighting the Exodusters seems a natural progression.     

“We’re very excited to welcome Crystal to St. Louis and look forward to their exhibition here next year,” said Simon Kelly, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Saint Louis Art Museum. “Crystal’s mining of the archive has been fascinating. Their exhibition promises to be deeply thought-provoking and an important contribution to the valuable Freund Fellowship partnership between our two institutions.” 

“I think of Crystal as building a spider web, connecting all these different institutions throughout St. Louis while also tapping into the city’s history,” Hauft said.