When Megan O’Grady looks at a painting, she doesn’t just examine its composition. She’s interested in the artist behind the brushstrokes and the social context in which the artist is working. This month she explored an extraordinary, yet little written about, history of Black abstraction in a piece for The New York Times: Once Overlooked, Black Abstract Painters Are Finally Given Their Due. CU Boulder Today spoke with O’Grady, a critic and essayist who recently joined the university as assistant professor of Critical and Curatorial Studies in Art and Art History, about why it’s important to revisit art history, its movements and its artists. Read more

Alejandra Abad and Román Anaya, University of Colorado Boulder fine arts graduate students, developed the “Our Wishes/Nuestros Deseos” project as a way to create community art during a pandemic. The concept is to reclaim flags, using them to embody inclusiveness instead of as divisive symbols. Read more

Professor George Rivera created this public art piece—his first ever billboard work—to address hate as a response to the current political climate, Black Lives Matter and the COVID-19 pandemic. It seeks to confront this issue in a simple and straightforward message without specifying any specific group. Read more