Exhibition Tour: American Sampler with Curator Julie Ault
Guest artist and curator Julie Ault will lead a conversation about her new project American Sampler: Activating the Archive. This research-driven, immersive exhibition in UMMA’s Vertical Gallery is a collaboration with the Joseph A. Labadie Collection of anarchism, protest, and social movements housed in the U-M Library’s Special Collections Research Center.
The exhibition centers on 1950s–1970s movements for Black freedom, civil rights, and antiwar activism, clarifying the aspirations and effects as well as the violent opposition these movements encountered. American Sampler invites visitors to examine how legacies of grassroots organizing and protest in U.S. history shape the present. This ambitious project is the inaugural collaboration of the new Labadie Collection and UMMA Fellowship Program.
Free and open to the public, registration required.
More About
Julie Ault
Julie Ault is an artist and writer whose practice explores how histories are retold and their influence on the present. Working across exhibition-making, research, publication, and archiving, she examines how cultural production is shaped by and can intervene in social and political systems. Ault’s exhibitions include Paper Mirror: Nancy Spero (Museo Tamayo and MoMA PS1, 2018–19), Afterlife: a constellation (Whitney Biennial, 2014), and Cultural Economies: Histories from the Alternative Arts Movement (The Drawing Center, 1996). Her publications include Felix Gonzalez-Torres (2006), Come Alive: The Spirited Art of Sister Corita (2006), and DUETS: Julie Ault & David Deitcher in Conversation on William Olander (2021), among others. Ault was a founding member of the artists’ collaborative Group Material (1979–1996), whose exhibitions addressed critical issues, including AIDS Timeline (1989). In 2018 she was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship for “redefining the role of the artwork and the artist” through her multi-modal practice.
SUPPORT
Lead support for American Sampler is provided by Joseph and Annette Allen, Nicole and Matthew Lester, Erica Gervais Pappendick and Ted Pappendick, Catherine Glynn Benkaim and Barbara Timmer, Susan and Richard Gutow, the U-M Arts Initiative, the U-M Institute for the Humanities, the Mary L. Wolter Welz Fund, and the Marvin H. and Mary M. Davidson Endowed Fund. Additional generous support is provided by the U-M CEW+ Frances and Sydney Lewis Visiting Leaders Fund, the U-M Inclusive History Project, the U-M Department of History, and the U-M Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies.
