Book Talk: Tamara Lanier’s Fight with Harvard to #FreeRenty
NOTE: ONLINE WEBINAR
5pm PT / 7pm CT / 8pm ET
Activist Tamara Lanier will join Hyperallergic’s Hrag Vartanian in a conversation about From These Roots, her new book describing her struggle with Harvard University regarding its ownership and control over images of her great-great-great grandfather Renty Taylor and his daughter Delia, both of whom were photographed as part of a Harvard professor’s racist research. These searing, painful images are infamous documents of scientific racism and the dehumanizing work of slavery in the past and in the present. Lanier asks who owns these images given the total absence of consent in their production? What does the work of undoing slavery’s legacies actually look like? From These Roots raises important questions about the work of reparation, and the decolonization of museums and archives.
Renty and Delia’s names are heralded on banners made by the artist Cauleen Smith, on view in the entrance of ICA LA as a part of the exhibition Scientia Sexualis.
This event is produced in a partnership between ICA LA and Hyperallergic.
For 15 years, Hyperallergic has published independent art journalism that’s bold, nuanced, and free for everyone. From groundbreaking art reviews to critical conversations on art’s intersection with social issues, we cover stories that need to be told.
Tamara K. Lanier is a tireless champion for truth and justice whose advocacy has taken her across Connecticut, the nation, and the globe. A 27-year veteran of the State of Connecticut Judicial Branch, Lanier retired in 2017 as Chief Probation Officer II in the Norwich Probation Office. She has a long and distinguished record of public service and social advocacy. Recently, she was appointed by Governor Ned Lamont to Connecticut’s first Hate Crime Advisory Council.
Recognized for her dedication to justice, Lanier was named Woman of the Year in 2015 by the Connecticut General Assembly’s Commission on Afro-American Affairs. In 2016, she received the Connecticut Commission of Human Rights and Opportunities’ Leaders and Legends Award and was honored with the Inspirational Women’s Award in 2019. Lanier has passionately advocated for a national dialogue on slavery’s enduring impact on society. Her advocacy has led to meetings with such dignitaries as Congressman John Lewis and Con …
Hrag Vartanian is editor-in-chief of Hyperallergic, which he co-founded with his partner, Veken Gueyikian. In 2024, he was a Poynter Fellow in Journalism at Yale University and was awarded a Susan C. Larsen Lifetime Achievement Award for Visual Arts Writing by the Rabkin Foundation
Jennifer Doyle holds a Ph.D from Duke University and is Professor of English at University of California, Riverside. She is a queer theorist, art critic, and sportswriter whose research focuses on art, sport, artist engagement with medical history, and artist collaboration with laboratory sciences. She is the author of Shadow of My Shadow (Duke University Press, 2024); Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (Duke University Press, 2013); and Campus Sex/Campus Security (Semiotext(e), 2015). From 2015–2017, she curated a series of feminist performances for The Broad Museum, Tip of Her Tongue. She also organized Nao Bustamante: Soldadera for the Vincent Price Art Museum (2015) and I Feel Different (2009–10) for Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). Doyle is a member of the Board of Directors for Human Resources Los Angeles. She is the recipient of an Ar …
Jeanne Vaccaro is a scholar and curator whose writing and social practice trace the idiosyncrasies of the archive to activate liberation histories and coalitions. She holds a Ph.D in Performance Studies from New York University and is Assistant Professor of Transgender Studies and Museum Studies at the University of Kansas. She was a research fellow at the Kinsey Institute and inaugural scholar-curator at the ONE Archives. She curated Foucault on Acid, with paintings by Grace Rosario (2021), and nothing lower than I, with sculptures by Xandra Ibarra (2022). She also organized Bring Your Own Body: transgender between archives and aesthetics for Cooper Union (2015). Her scholarly writing is published in GLQ, the Journal of Modern Craft, Radical History Review, Social Text, TSQ, and Trap Door, and her forthcoming book Handmade: feelings and textures of transgender, was awarded the Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation. She is co-founder of the NYC …
One woman’s unrelenting mission to reclaim her ancestors’ history and honor their lineage pits her against one of the country’s most powerful institutions: Harvard University
Tamara Lanier grew up listening to her mother’s stories about her ancestors. As Black Americans descended from enslaved people brought to America, they knew all too well how fragile the tapestry of a lineage could be. As her mother’s health declined, she pushed her daughter to dig into those stories. “Tell them about Papa Renty,” she would say. It was her mother’s last wish.
Thus begins one woman’s remarkable commitment to document that story. Her discovery of a nineteenth-century daguerreotype at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, one of the first-ever photos of enslaved people from Africa, reveals a dark-skinned man with short-cropped silver hair and chiseled cheekbones. The information read “Renty, Congo.” All at once, Lanier knew she was staring at the ancestor her mother told her so much about—Papa Renty.
In a compelling account covering more than a decade of her own research, Lanier takes us on her quest to prove her genealogical bloodline to Papa Renty’s that pits her in a legal battle against Harvard and its army of lawyers. The question is, who has claim to the stories, artifacts, and remnants of America’s stained history—the institutions who acquired and housed them for generations, or the descendants who have survived?
From These Roots is not only a historical record of one woman’s lineage but a call to justice that fights for all those demanding to reclaim, honor, and lay to rest the remains of mishandled lives and memories.
– Penguin Random House
