How the Debates Over Art, Race, and Tech Have Changed

If you had to pick two conversations that defined the last 10 years in art, one would certainly be about digital culture and online life. The other would be about race, racism, and representation. The critic and artist Aria Dean has been at the center of both these conversations.

As a theorist, her essays on these topics are much cited. You can find them gathered in the recent collection Bad Infinity, from Sternberg Press. She also worked for some years at Rhizome.org, one of the most important venues advocating for digital art.

As as an artist, Dean has been in many important shows, from the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. Biennial to the Whitney Biennial here in New York. Recently, for the Performa biennial of performance art, Dean staged The Color Scheme, a two-person theatrical work, which is also set to tour to Berlin later this year.

The Color Scheme focuses on an imagined meeting in the 1920s in Berlin, between two Black intellectuals, one called The Poet and the other called The Philosopher. It may be as close as Dean has come to totally fusing her work as a thinker with her work as an art maker. It literally stages a conversation about Black culture, politics, and art. Yet The Color Scheme also plunges us a century back in time, very much away from the world of digital culture she has written so much about.

It felt to me like a continuation of the important debates Dean has been a part of, but also an attempt to find new perspective. And that seemed a good cue to talk with her about how she’s viewing art now, why she’s looking to art history, and how her views have evolved over a tumultuous decade.