Karyn Olivier with Samantha A. Noël + Jova Lynne

Karyn Olivier

Karyn Olivier creates sculpture, installation, and public art. She is currently the Public Works Artist-in-Residence at the Free Library of Philadelphia. Forthcoming projects include a memorial to Vel R. Phillips. Recent presentations include the 2024 Whitney Biennial, La Trienal at El Museo del Barrio, the Malta Biennale, and Prospect.6 in New Orleans.

Olivier has exhibited widely at institutions such as the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and MoMA PS1. She has received major honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize, and a USA Fellowship, and is a professor of sculpture at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture.

Samantha A. Noël

Samantha A. Noël is an Associate Professor of Art History and the Hawkins Ferry Endowed Chair in Modern and Contemporary Art at Wayne State University. She received her B.A. in Fine Art from Brooklyn College, C.U.N.Y., and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from Duke University. Her research interests revolve around the history of art, visual culture, and performance of the Black Diaspora. She has published on Black modern and contemporary art and performance in journals such as Small Axe, Third Text, Art Journal, October, Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, and Woman’s Art Journal. Noël’s book, Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism (Duke University Press, February 2021), offers a thorough investigation of how Caribbean and American artists of the early twentieth century were responding to colonial and hegemonic regimes through visual and performative tropicalist representation. Noël is working on a new book tentatively titled Diasporic Art in the Age of Black Power. This book aims to identify instances in which the iterations of the Third World Left in the United States and the Caribbean crossed paths and determined a need for internationalism in black creative expression during the 1960s and 1970s that worked in tandem with the political radicalism of that era.

Jova Lynne

Jova Lynne is a multidisciplinary artist exploring identity, power, and the body through photography, video, performance, and installation. Her Jamaican heritage informs her work, which examines how selfhood is shaped by memory and mythology. She holds an MFA in Photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BA in Film/Video from Hampshire College. 

Recent solo exhibitions include The Color of You at the Buffalo Institute of Contemporary Art (2026), Convergence at Sculpture Center in Cleveland (2024), and Split at Matéria Gallery in Detroit (2023). Notable group shows feature the Kingston Biennial (2024) and Luminosity at the Charles H. Wright Museum (2025).

Lynne has participated in residencies at Yaddo (2024) and Mass MoCA (2020), with her work represented in collections such as the Harvard Art Museums and the Detroit Institute of Arts. Her practice has been highlighted in publications such as The New York Times and ArtForum.