Livestream: Crystal Williams and Ford Foundation president lead MoMA equity discussion
Professor of English, chief diversity officer, and associate vice president Crystal Williams is a featured speaker at a sold-out and livestreamed edition of the Equity Series at the Museum of Modern Art at 6:30 p.m. Friday, March 11.
Moderated by cultural critic Vinson Cunningham, the evening’s discussion brings together Williams, an author and highly regarded equity advocate in U.S. higher education, and Darren Walker, who, as president of the Ford Foundation, has led the foundation to focus on “inequality [as] the problem of the times,” in the words of a New Yorker profile.
Livestream of the Equity Series event featuring Crystal Williams begins at 6:30 p.m., March 11
Their conversation will grapple on the meaning of “cultural equity” and the related questions the term raises, such as:
- What are the intellectual and structural barriers to achieving cultural equity?
- How can we make progress?
- How do we build cultural institutions that welcome and inspire visitors of all backgrounds?
- What role do museums and other cultural organizations, foundations, critics, and government have to play?
Williams is the author of four collections of poetry; as a conversation prompt for the evening, MOMA shared this reading of her poem “Double Helix.”
Williams wrote the poem in response to Jacob Lawrence’s “The Migration Series” and to The Warmth of Other Suns, the award-winning historical study by Isabel Wilkerson, who was the college’s 2014 Commencement speaker.
MOMA’s Equity Series offers public conversations about the meaning of equity in contemporary culture and society, and is organized by The Museum of Modern Art and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
