History Repeats Itself: Curating Protest
Talk
May 13 @ 6:00 pm – 7:15 pm EDT
Curators Maggie Mustard and La Tanya Autry discuss how protest and resistance materials are selected, organized, and presented in museums and libraries. Moderated by Deirdre Donohue.
Hosted by the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs at The New York Public Library in association with Printed Matter.
Presented in collaboration with Flashpoint! Protest Photography in Print, a traveling reading room exhibition at Printed Matter organized by 10×10 Photobooks. Curators in the Library’s two photography divisions discuss how protest and resistance materials and archives are collected, organized, and shared with the public. They will explore the challenges of shaping exhibitions around grassroots social movements, as well as how these collections are preserved within institutions and made accessible.
Featuring presentations by Associate Curator in the Division of Photographs and Prints at the Schomburg Center La Tanya S. Autry and Assistant Curator of Photography Maggie Mustard, with a panel to follow moderated by Assistant Director of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs Deirdre Donohue.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
La Tanya S. Autry is the Associate Curator of the Division of Photographs and Prints at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. As an art historian with a specialty in photography, Black Studies, and museum studies, she has created essays, exhibitions, and programs focused on historical and current issues of Black life, memory, and ethical curatorial praxis. Before joining The New York Public Library, she co-produced Museums Are Not Neutral, a global movement that disavows propaganda that claims museums exist outside of historical and social production. Presently La Tanya is co-curating an exhibition featuring the work of Black women artists that will be on view September 2026 at the Schomburg Center.
Maggie Mustard is Assistant Curator of Photography in the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs at The New York Public Library. She earned her PhD in Art History and Archaeology from Columbia University, where her dissertation focused on Japanese postwar photographer Kawada Kikuji. Previous professional roles include the Marcia Tucker Senior Research Fellow at the New Museum of Contemporary Art and Visiting Assistant Professor at Wesleyan University. Recent exhibitions curated or co-curated at the NYPL include New York Subways 1977: Alen MacWeeney (2023), and The Awe of the Arctic: A Visual History (2024). Her upcoming exhibition The Art of Declaration, part of the NYPL’s initiative commemorating the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, will open to the public in June 2026.
Deirdre Donohue, the Assistant Director of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs at The New York Public Library, previously served as the Stephanie Shuman Director of Library, Archives, and Museum Collections at the International Center of Photography, Graduate Faculty of both Pratt Institute’s School of Information and ICP/Bard’s Masters Program in Advanced Photographic Studies, as a Board Member of 10X10 Photobooks, Advisory Board of Penumbra Foundation, and was the Guest Editor of Aperture’s Photobook Review 014.