Coco Fusco and Jeffrey Gibson to Deliver 2026 Sam Gilliam Lecture Series at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center

Coco Fusco lecture: June 8, 2026

Jeffrey Gibson lecture: November 12, 2026

Washington, D.C. (May 12, 2026) — Johns Hopkins University today announced interdisciplinary artists Coco Fusco and Jeffrey Gibson as the speakers for the second annual Sam Gilliam Lecture Series at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C. Launched in 2025 and made possible by the Sam Gilliam Foundation, the free public series invites prominent artists and thinkers to the university’s Washington, D.C. hub to reflect on the intersections between contemporary art, academia, public policy, and the role art plays in advancing democracy. The series has previously featured art and cultural historian Sarah Lewis and artist Theaster Gates.

Coco Fusco, a Cuban American interdisciplinary artist, writer, and professor, whose work spans performance, video, and criticism, will lead the next lecture on June 8, 2026. Fusco will explore her practice of bridging art, activism, and anthropology to challenge traditional power structures.

Jeffrey Gibson is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and convener whose artistic approach combines contemporary and historical references, layered media, and Indigenous and Western influences to explore how meaning is made and understood. Gibson will take the Hopkins Bloomberg Center stage on November 12, 2026, to discuss how he engages with complex ideas of belonging and collectivity in his own practice and through collaboration.

“The Hopkins Bloomberg Center brings together a wide range of voices for important and sometimes challenging conversations, and the Gilliam Lecture Series continues to provide an invaluable platform to explore the role of art in addressing critical issues in our country,” said Cybele Bjorklund, executive director of the Hopkins Bloomberg Center. “We are grateful to Annie Gawlak and the Sam Gilliam Foundation for their ongoing support that increases public access to and understanding of the arts at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center.”

Established to honor the life and legacy of the late artist Sam Gilliam (1933–2022), the series brings together leading creative voices from different viewpoints, artistic traditions, and disciplines, and pairs them in conversation with an academic expert from Johns Hopkins faculty. Fusco’s lecture will be followed by a fireside chat with Dora Malech, an award-winning poet and the university’s newly appointed senior advisor to the provost for the arts. Gibson will be joined by Melissa Walls, the co-director of the Center for Indigenous Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“Coco Fusco’s unflinching examination of oppression and cultural resistance, and Jeffrey Gibson’s powerful synthesis of Indigenous traditions and contemporary culture, place both artists in direct dialogue with Sam’s lifelong commitment to social justice and racial equity,” said Annie Gawlak, president of the Sam Gilliam Foundation. “We are glad to continue the partnership with Johns Hopkins and together, create space for vital conversations at the intersection of art, identity, and civic life.”

This collaboration is part of a broader suite of free public arts programming offered by the Hopkins Bloomberg Center, which includes music and dance performances, film screenings, book discussions, and art exhibitions in the Irene and Richard Frary Gallery. The Gallery features rotating art exhibitions drawn from the university’s collections and special exhibitions in partnership with leading museums and collections. Currently on view through June 13, 2026, Artistic Generosity and the American Artist Abroad, presents Sam Gilliam, Ellsworth Kelly, Martin Puryear, Carrie Mae Weems, and other leading artists who have played a vital role in our nation’s cultural diplomacy efforts. The exhibition reflects four decades of artistic exchange through the efforts of the Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies (FAPE), a nonprofit, nonpartisan foundation providing permanent works of American art for U.S. embassies around the world.

For more information and to register for Fusco’s lecture, visit the event page.

About Sam Gilliam

Gilliam (1933–2022) was a pioneering African American artist renowned not only for his great innovations in Post-war American art, but also his deep commitments to issues of social justice, racial equity, and democratizing access to art. Having moved to Washington, D.C. in 1962 and living there throughout his prolific career, Gilliam had a long-standing and deep relationship with the city throughout the Civil Rights Movement and other periods of extreme change in the nation.

Attendees at the lectures will also be able to visit a permanent installation by Gilliam on the Center’s ground floor, A Lovely Blue And ! (2022), among the final works created by the artist in the months before his death. The work encapsulates Gilliam’s belief in the efficacy of abstraction and the value of risk-taking. On public view in the center’s pre-function space, the monumental 96″ × 240″ painting exemplifies Gilliam’s expanded notion of the canvas as a three-dimensional object, showcasing the signature beveled-edge format he debuted in the 1960s and returned to in his later years. Additionally, a complementary work from the same period, Gilliam’s Cerebral (2022) — a tondo on loan from the Sam Gilliam Foundation — is currently on view in the Irene and Richard Frary Gallery as part of Artistic Generosity and the American Artist Abroad.

About Coco Fusco

Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in New York. She is a recipient of a 2023 Free Speech Defender Award from the National Coalition Against Censorship, a 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters Art Award, a 2021 Latinx Artist Fellowship, a 2021 Anonymous Was A Woman award, a 2018 Rabkin Prize for Art Criticism, a 2016 Greenfield Prize, a 2014 CINTAS Fellowship, a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2013 Absolut Art Writing Award, a 2013 Fulbright Fellowship, a 2012 USA Artists Fellowship, and a 2003 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts.

Fusco’s performances and videos have been presented at the 56th Venice Biennale, the Sharjah Biennia, Frieze Special Projects, Basel Unlimited, three Whitney Biennials (2022, 2008, and 1993), and several other international exhibitions. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum, the Centre Pompidou, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona. A retrospective entitled Tomorrow, I Will Become an Island opened at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin in September 2023. An accompanying monograph with the same title was just published by Thames & Hudson.

Fusco received her B.A. in Semiotics from Brown University (1982), her M.A. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University (1985), and her Ph.D. in Art and Visual Culture from Middlesex University (2007). Fusco is a professor at the Cooper Union School of Art.

About Jeffrey Gibson

Jeffrey Gibson (American, b. 1972) is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and convener celebrated for his work in painting, installation, video, and performance. For over two decades, he has examined how language, pattern, and music construct meaning, synthesizing Indigenous and Western traditions through vibrant color, complex patterning, and layered sound. A member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, Gibson represented the U.S. at the 2024 Venice Biennale with his acclaimed exhibition the space in which to place me, which made its U.S. debut at The Broad in Los Angeles in May 2025. In June 2025, he unveiled a site-specific installation at Kunsthaus Zürich. Gibson was selected for the Metropolitan Museum’s 2025 Genesis Facade Commission, and his monumental bronze sculptures will be on view through June 2026. His work is held in major collections including MoMA, the Whitney, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art. He lives in New York’s Hudson Valley and is artist-in-residence at Bard College.

About the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center

Building on Johns Hopkins’ history as the nation’s first research university, the Hopkins Bloomberg Center serves as a nexus for trusted academic experts, global leaders, policymakers, and students to provide multidisciplinary expertise and objectivity to decision-makers while educating future civic leaders. The Hopkins Bloomberg Center brings together the brightest minds in policy, business, academics, and nonprofits to find solutions to global challenges and opportunities for human advancement. State-of-the-art facilities offer dynamic learning experiences and adapt to emerging disciplines.

About the Sam Gilliam Foundation

Established in 2023, the Sam Gilliam Foundation advances the vision and values of abstract artist Sam Gilliam by organizing and supporting significant exhibitions of the artist’s work, fostering new research and publications, and collaborating with arts organizations and institutions on initiatives that extend Gilliam’s generosity and enthusiasm for supporting emerging and longtime artists, art students, scholars, curators, and the cultural ecosystem at large. Helmed by Annie Gawlak, the Foundation serves as a primary resource on the artist and a steward of his collection and archive, with important holdings of Gilliam’s work in a variety of mediums and original papers and materials pertaining to his life and work. Since its activation, the Foundation has expanded its mission to champion the work of rising artists by establishing the Sam Gilliam Award in partnership with Dia Art Foundation in 2023, and to continue Gilliam’s legacy by launching the Gilliam Visiting Artist Program in collaboration with the Speed Art Museum in 2024.