Join Paul Rucker, Assistant Professor, iCubed Arts Research Fellow and Curator for Creative Collaboration for the final VCUarts Lecture Series event of the semester.
Preview current projects by Rucker, including Cary Forward, his new museum opening in late 2025. Cary Forward’s mission is to eradicate current and past histories of coordinated exclusion and harm. Rucker will also introduce “Redirect: Do you think…,” an internet-based project on the political choices we make, and the future of “Banking While Black” and the ongoing practices of coordinated exclusion and economic violence today.
Paul Rucker is a multimedia visual artist, composer and musician. His practice often integrates live performance, original musical compositions and visual art installation. For nearly two decades, Rucker has used his own brand of art making as a social practice, which illuminates the legacy of enslavement in America and its relationship to the current socio-political moment. His work is the product of a rich interactive process, through which he investigates community impacts, human rights issues, historical research, and basic human emotions.
Rucker has received numerous grants, awards and residencies for visual art and music. He is a Creative Capital grantee in visual art as well as a multiple grantee from MAP Fund for performance. He was awarded the Joan Mitchell Painters & Sculptors Grant as well as the Mary Sawyer Baker Award. In 2016, Paul received the Rauschenberg Artist as Activist fellowship and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, becoming the first artist in residence at the National Museum of African American Culture. He was awarded a 2017 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2018 TED Fellowship, a 2020 TED Senior Fellowship, and the 2018 Arts Innovator Award from the Dale and Leslie Chihuly Foundation and Artist Trust. He has received support from the Robert W Deutsch Foundation, the Ford/Art for Justice Fund for 2000 and 2022, and the Mellon Foundation for 2022 for his museum Cary Forward, opening in 2025.
This is a hybrid event. Please register in advance to attend virtually.