Lunder Institute Announces its 2024/2025 Fellows: Dylan Robinson and Legacy Russell

Lunder Institute announces that Dylan Robinson and Legacy Russell have been selected for yearlong fellowships with the Lunder Institute for American Art. Robinson and Russell are each multifaceted scholars whose practices include curatorial, scholarly, and creative aspects. Both fellowships will begin this month and span a full year, including opportunities for engagement with Colby’s campus community during the upcoming academic year.

Robinson is a Stó:lō scholar and artist, and member of the Skwah First Nation. His curatorial work includes Soundings, a touring exhibition that features an ever-growing number of art-scores by Indigenous artists. Other work includes Caring for Our Ancestors, a project that seeks to reconnect kinship with Indigenous life incarcerated in museums. His book Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies examines Indigenous and settler colonial practices of listening.

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. She will utilize her fellowship to advance her research on what she calls “networked” or “memetic” Blackness—the ways in which Black visual vernacular transmits memetically through and beyond cybercultures as a form of data transfer. Rising out of the thought surrounding her new book BLACK MEME, she is keen to take a new turn in spiraling outward from that research and instead explore further how the framework of the “meme” is applied as a form of performative cultural expression.

Image: Dylan Robinson; Legacy Russell, photo by Mina Alyeshmerni.

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