Coco Fusco and Eva Díaz in Conversation

Join artist Coco Fusco and art historian and critic Eva Díaz for an evening on speculative futures.

Artist Coco Fusco has explored anachronism and cultural inequality throughout her career, including in her work Undiscovered Amerindians (1992-94, undertaken with Guillermo Gómez-Peña) included in Past as Prologue: A Historical Acknowledgment, Part II. In this discussion, Fusco and art historian and critic Eva Díaz, author of the recently published book After Spaceship Earth: Art, Techno-utopia, and Other Science Fictions (Yale University Press, 2025), will discuss Afrofuturist time, and the ways art can be a powerful tool to redress economic, gender, and racial violence, as well as ecological injustices.

RESERVATIONS: Admission is free but reservations are required.

ACCESSIBILITY: This venue is fully accessible to wheelchairs. To request free ASL (American Sign Language) interpretation or CART (Communication Access Real-Time Translation) captioning service, email your request at least three weeks in advance of the event to info@nationalacademy.org.

About the Speakers

Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. She is a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters and a Professor of Art at Cooper Union. Fusco is a recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship, a United States Artists fellowship, a Fulbright fellowship and a Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. Fusco's performances and videos have been presented in the 56th Venice Biennale, 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 Art Institute of Chicago, The Walker Art Center, the Centre Pompidou, the Imperial War Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona. She is represented by Mendes Wood DM.

Fusco is the author of Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba(2015), English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (1995), The Bodies That Were Not Ours (2001) and A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008). Tomorrow I Will Become an Island, a solo retrospective of Fusco’s works was presented at Berlin’s KW Institute of Contemporary Art in 2023, accompanied by a monograph published by Thames & Hudson. Another survey of her works will open at MACBA in Barcelona in May 2025.

Eva Díaz is Professor of Contemporary Art History at Pratt Institute. She received her B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University. Her teaching and scholarship are informed by historical and contemporary interdisciplinary collaborations between artists, designers, and other cultural producers. Her first book, The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College, was released in 2015 by the University of Chicago Press. Díaz's new book After Spaceship Earth: Art, Techno-utopia, and Other Science Fictions (Yale University Press, March 2025) analyzes the influence of R. Buckminster Fuller in contemporary art. The book investigates artists’ challenges to a privatized and highly-surveilled future in outer space, and the means by which the space “race” and colonization are being reformulated as powerful tools to readdress economic, gender, and racial inequality, as well as ecological injustices. She is also the editor of Dorothea Rockburne (Dia Art Foundation and Yale University Press, 2024). Díaz is currently at work on a book that explores non-visual experiences in art, such as olfaction, topological procedures, and haptics, by examining the overvaluation of certain experiences in culture (vision and cognition, distance and analysis, for example) and the devaluation of others (smell and sensuality, proximity and the body). In support of this new research, Díaz was awarded a grant from the Huntington Library, and she was in residence at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles as a Getty Scholar in 2023-2024

Image: Coco Fusco, 'The Undiscovered Amerindians Tour', 1992-1994 /2019