Join us on Thursday August 19, 2021 at 6:30 pm EST for a ZOOM conversation with artist Lamar Peterson. Presented in conversation with SNMA Executive Director Hunter O’Hanian, Lamar Peterson will discuss his drawing and painting practice.

Lamar Peterson’s artistic practice:

For over 15 years, Peterson has painted a wide range of subjects from cartoon landscapes populated by African American suburbanites to surreal portraits of Michael Jackson. The artist has collaged tatters into representations of faces and employed colorful party streamers as framing devices.  Within all his various constructions, Peterson continually evokes a transformation or disfiguration as he depicts young African American men and women in our contemporary moment in time. His quasi-abstract figure and simplified forms are pared down to raw emotion suggesting elements of strength, violence, and vulnerability.

About Lamar Peterson

Lamar Peterson (born 1974 in St. Petersburg, Florida) received his MFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2001. He has had previous solo exhibitions at The Studio Museum of Harlem, New York; Rochester Arts Center, Minnesota; Orlando Museum of Art, Florida; University Art Museum at SUNY, Albany; Deitch Projects, New York; and Franklin Art Works, Minneapolis, MN.  He has exhibited in numerous group shows including the Fifth International SITE Santa Fe Biennial 2004, Santa Fe, NM; The Drawing Center, New York, NY; The Kemper Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; the Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY, Oakland University Art Gallery, Rochester, MI, Mennello Museum of American Art, Orlando, FL and most recently he was included in Black Pulp curated by William Villalongo and Mark Thomas Gibson at the IPCNY, New York and Yale University Art Gallery. Peterson is an Assistant Professor of Drawing & Painting at the University of Minnesota.