Legacy Russell is a curator and writer. Born and raised in New York City, she is the Executive Director & Chief Curator at The Kitchen. Formerly she was the Associate Curator of Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Russell holds an MRes with Distinction in Art History from Goldsmiths, University of London with a focus in Visual Culture. Her academic, curatorial, and creative work focuses on gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new media ritual. Russell's written work, interviews, and essays have been published internationally. She is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation 2019 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency Fellow, and a recipient of the 2021 Creative Capital Award. Her first book Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020) is published by Verso Books. Her second book, BLACK MEME, is forthcoming via Verso Books.
List of Illustrations
Overture: Black Planets / Black Memes / Black Acts
1. Strange Fruit, Gone Viral: The Souls of Moving Image
2. Eating the Other: Emmett Till's Memory, Myth, and Black Magic
3. Selma On My Mind: Protest, Media, and Viral Witness
4. Sporting the Black Complaint: John Carlos and Tommie Smith, Silent Blackness, and Memetic Nationhood
5. Viral Zombiism: Michael Jackson and "Thriller"
6. Paris is Burning: Viral Ballrooms and Memetic Royalties
7. Reality, Televised: On the Rodney King Generation
8. Refusing Symbolism: Anita Hill and Magic Johnson
9. "The Dancing Baby": Birth of a [Gif] Nation
10. The Shadow, The Substance: Renty and Delia as Viral Daguerreotypes
11. Meme Afterlives: Lavish Reynolds In Broadcast (And, Anyway, Arrest the Cops That Killed Breonna Taylor)
Outro in Remix: Lyric for the Black Meme
Acknowledgments
Notes
