Multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker and writer Crystal Z Campbell has been named the Henry L. and Natalie E. Freund Teaching Fellow at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis for the 2023-24 academic year.
Now 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. For example, 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.
Read more on the Sam Fox School website.
