Vienna 1060
Austria
In BLACK MEME, Legacy Russell, award-winning author of the groundbreaking GLITCH FEMINISM, explores the “meme” as mapped to Black visual culture from 1900 to the present, mining both archival and contemporary media.
Russell argues that without the contributions of Black people, digital culture would not exist in its current form. These meditations include the circulation of lynching postcards; why a mother allowed JET magazine to publish a picture of her dead son, Emmett Till; and how the televised broadcast of protesters in Selma changed the debate on civil rights. Questions of the media representation of Blackness come to the fore as Russell considers how citizen-recorded footage of the LAPD beating Rodney King became the first viral video. Why the Anita Hill hearings shed light on the media’s creation of the Black icon. The ownership of Black imagery and death is considered in the story of Tamara Lanier’s fight to reclaim the daguerreotypes of her enslaved ancestors from Harvard. Meanwhile the live broadcast on Facebook of the murder of Philando Castile by the police after he was stopped for a broken taillight forces us to bear witness to the persistent legacy of the Black meme.
Through imagery, memory, and technology, BLACK MEME shows us how images of Blackness have always been central to our understanding of the modern world.
Legacy Russell is a curator and writer. Born and raised in New York City, she is the Executive Director & Chief Curator of the experimental arts institution The Kitchen. Her academic, curatorial, and creative work focuses on gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new media ritual.
A selection of recent exhibitions include Code Switch: Distributing Blackness, Reprogramming Internet Art (2024–25), The Kitchen, in collaboration with the Schomburg Center and MOCAD); Harmony Holiday: BLACK BACKSTAGE (2024, The Kitchen); Matthew Lutz-Kinoy: Filling Station (2023, The Kitchen); Samora Pinderhughes: GRIEF (2022, The Kitchen); satellite projects The Condition of Being Addressable (ICA LA, 2022); The New Bend (Hauser & Wirth, 2022–23); Sadie Barnette: The New Eagle Creek Saloon and madison moore: Nightlife-in-Residence (2022, The Kitchen) Projects: Kahlil Robert Irving (2021), Projects: Garrett Bradley (2020), and Projects: Michael Armitage (2019), all with The Studio Museum in Harlem in partnership with The Museum of Modern Art; Thomas J Price: Witness (2021); Dozie Kanu: Function (2019), Chloë Bass: Wayfinding (2019), and LEAN with Performa’s Radical Broadcast online (2020) and in physical space at Kunsthall Stavanger (2021). She is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation 2019 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency Fellow, a recipient of the 2021 Creative Capital Award, a 2022–23 Pompeii Commitment Digital Fellow, a 2023 Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellow, a 2024–25 Lunder Institute for American Art Fellow, and a 2025–26 Obama Leader awardee. In 2025, Russell was appointed to Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s Arts & Culture Transition Committee for New York City in late 2025, bringing her expertise in contemporary art and institutions to help shape NYC’s future cultural policy alongside other leading arts figures. Her first book is the critically acclaimed Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (Verso Books, 2020). Her second book BLACK MEME (Verso Books, 2024) was shortlisted for the 2024 The National Book Critics Circle Award. Russell’s first chapbook of poems is GAY POMPEII from GenderFail, published in 2025. More info: STUDIO LEGACY.
Otto Wagner Lecture Series by Institute for Art and Architecture (IKA)
The Otto Wagner Lectures are a highlight of the academic events organized by the Institute for Art and Architecture (IKA). The lecture series gives a platform to speakers from other disciplines and contexts whose outstanding intellectual and/or artistic contributions promote discourse that can inspire and invigorate architectural discussion with novel themes and perspectives. In 2018, the lecture was given by Antonio Negri, who spoke about forms of collective organization with the title “A Subject for Europe”, in 2019, Vandana Shiva gave a lecture entitled “Soil not Oil. The transfer from the age of fossil fuel to the awareness of a living earth”, and in 2025, Matthew Gandy lectured on “Urban Imaginaries”, illuminating utopian and dystopian dimensions to future cities.
