Conversation: Hamza Walker and Benjamin Anderson with TK Smith on Spolia
Date and Time
Location
NBAC + NON STNDRD
About the Event
Coyote Time Convening: Climate Futures and Infrastructural Imaginaries
At the National Building Arts Center, hundreds of thousands of salvaged artifacts hold histories of conflict, displacement, and power. This conversation brings together curator and writer Hamza Walker, art historian and classicist Benjamin Anderson, and curator and writer TK Smith to explore how contested monuments and architectural fragments can be recontextualized to challenge dominant histories. Drawing on Walker’s role in organizing MONUMENTS and NBAC’s behind-the-scenes stewardship of exhibition materials, the speakers will consider spolia–artifacts and objects taken from old structures and repurposed for new uses–as a powerful conceptual strategy. Together, they will examine how artists, curators, and historians can transform the narratives of objects and the structures of white supremacy they represent through new forms of preservation, interpretation, and artistic intervention.
Benjamin Anderson is Associate Professor of History of Art and Classics at Cornell University. He is the author of Cosmos and Community in Early Medieval Art (2017) and the forthcoming Origins of Iconoclasm; and the editor of anthologies on antiquarianism, Byzantine neighborhoods, Hagia Sophia, and the history of Byzantine studies. In 2025-26, he was a Faculty Fellow at the Society for the Humanities.
TK Smith is an award-winning independent curator, writer, and cultural historian.
Hamza Walker is director of The Brick (formerly LAXART), a non-profit alternative art space in Los Angeles. Walker has curated dozens of exhibitions ranging from solo to thematic group exhibitions; from the production of new work to career surveys. Recent exhibitions include MONUMENTS, (co-curated w/Bennett Simpson and Kara Walker, and co-organized with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2025/2026; Gregg Bordowitz, This Is Not A Love Song, 2025; Betsy Paige Smith, Unshade Me Of You, 2025; Nikita Gale, Takers, 2022; Ari Marcopoulos & Joe McPhee, Alone Together, 2021; Kandis Williams/Cassandra Press’ The Absolute Right to Exclude (2021); and Postcommodity’s Some Reach While Others Clap (2020).
This event is part of Counterpublic 2026: Coyote Time and our three-day Climate Convening, which brings together artists, writers, organizers, designers, scientists, cultural leaders, and community practitioners to explore climate as a lived reality and exhibitions as opportunities for worldbuilding.
For questions, reach out to Kristin Fleischmann Brewer at kfbrewer@counterpublic.org.
Register
Coyote Time Convening Registration
Space is limited and registration is required. We hope you’ll join us for this focused conversation and opportunity to learn alongside peers working to build more sustainable, responsive, and resilient cultural institutions.
Convening Support
The Coyote Time Convening is supported by the Frankenthaler Climate Initiative, established by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation.
The Climate Forward Institutions Workshop directly supports Counterpublic’s Climate Impact Plan. Learn more here.
This year, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation awarded The Luminary, G-CADD: Granite City Art + Design District, The Griot Museum of Black History, and the National Building Arts Center funds to lower their carbon impacts across their campuses. In addition, the Foundation awarded Counterpublic a grant to support our work with Laura Lupton of LHL Consulting to implement our climate action plan with a long-term vision toward mitigation, adaptation, and resilience and creating a model for biennials, triennials and other large-scale exhibitions to account for their climate impacts.
The Frankenthaler Climate Initiative is the first nationwide program to support energy efficiency and clean energy use for the visual arts and the largest private national grantmaking program to address climate action through cultural institutions. The ongoing initiative provides critical support to visual arts organizations in the United States seeking to assess their impact on the environment and to lower ongoing energy costs. The Foundation has conferred more than $21.8 million since its launch in 2021, with 401 unique grants given for energy efficiency and clean energy projects at 295 institutions across 42 states and Puerto Rico.