Over his nearly forty year career, Douglas (b. 1960, Vancouver) has gained global renown for expansive and meticulous works that layer time and place to create new ways of grasping the present. Stan Douglas: Ghostlight, a survey exhibition of his work, premieres a major new installation that revisits D. W. Griffiths’s racist silent-era epic The Birth of a Nation (1915), framed by works from the 1990s to the present. These multimedia works explore topics ranging from settler colonialism in the Americas, to the legacies of transatlantic slavery, to modern liberation movements in Africa and Europe and their global reverberations. The artist’s deep research and longtime commitments to these histories opens a sweeping view of the present—one shedding light on the moments of breakdown and chaos that attend societies in upheaval.
On Sunday, June 22, at 12pm CCS Bard will present a roundtable conversation with Douglas on the survey exhibition and new work Birth of a Nation (2025) with exhibition curator Lauren Cornell, artist Jace Clayton, and writer and curator Ed Halter.
Everyone is encouraged to see the exhibition Stan Douglas: Ghostlight before attending the roundtable conversation, as visuals of the works will not be provided.
2025 public programming at the Hessel Museum of Art is made possible, in part, through funding from the County of Dutchess and Destination Dutchess (formerly Dutchess Tourism) and administered by Arts Mid-Hudson.
