In Conversation

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On May 13, 2026, Art Matters hosted artists Elissa Blount Moorhead and Marilyn Nance—two Art Matters grantees—for a conversation on archives at Aubin Pictures in New York City.

Nance is renowned for her meticulous personal collection spanning decades of negatives, photographs, contact sheets, and ephemera—physical artifacts documenting the cultural history of the United States and the African Diaspora throughout the late twentieth century.

Blount Moorhead is currently working on Perfect Memory Radio, a deep listening project “charting the waters of Black memory, culture, and place,” drawing primarily upon sound and music.

Together, they steward the archive of their late friend, Valerie J. Maynard.

This conversation brought them together as friends and collaborators, reflecting on methods and strategies for resisting erasure and honoring Black presence in everyday life.

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Elissa Blount Moorhead is the founder and principal of Seven Stories, a production company creating film, television, and time-based installations. Her directing work includes As of A Now (an AR/film projection installation), Jay-Z’s 4:44, Back and Song (a four-channel installation with Bradford Young), and Apologue for the Darkest Gods for PBS.

She is the author of P Is for Pussy, an illustrated “children’s” book, and a featured essayist in How We Fight White Supremacy: A Field Guide to Black Resistance. Her awards include Creative Capital, the Comedy Central–Sundance Award, Bellagio Residency, USA Artist Fellowship, The Baker Prize, Zaentz Innovation Award, Ford–Just Films Fellowship, the Baldwin Fellowship at Carmargo, France, and Art Omi.

Blount Moorhead was a featured artist in Georgia State University’s Liquid Blackness. Her work has been reviewed in Black Cinema & Visual Culture and Art and Politics in the 21st Century, and in texts by Artel Great, Ed Guerrero, and Nam June Paik published by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea. Her time-based film work was acquired by the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2022.

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Marilyn Nance has documented unique moments in the cultural history of the United States and the African Diaspora. A two-time finalist for the W. Eugene Smith Award in Humanistic Photography, her work is included in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, MoMA, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Library of Congress. Her photographs appear in numerous publications, including The World History of Photography, History of Women in Photography, and The Black Photographers Annual.

Her 2022 monograph, Last Day in Lagos draws from her extensive archive to chronicle FESTAC 77, the Second World Festival of Black and African Arts and Culture held in Lagos, Nigeria, highlighting its sociopolitical significance and exuberant intensity.

Nance is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society and is widely recognized for her meticulous archival practices and advocacy for preservation.