Art Basel Miami Program - VIP Lecture & Guided Tour

The Frederick Douglass Lecture – Art of Transformation ’25

The Frederick Douglass Lecture extends the Ten North Group’s 2025 exhibition, At the Edge of Entanglement, into a moral reflection—an embodied awareness in artistic expression that, in the spirit of Douglass the abolitionist and radical thinker, refuses the paralysis of contemplation and fuses moral clarity with aesthetic force. In an era shadowed by resurgent hatreds and fractured truths, the lecture explores where the artist’s private soul-searching meets the public urgency of liberation—where art gropes for a vocabulary of resistance against the undertow of forgetting. Rooted in the exhibition’s interrogation of history, power, and representation, the Douglass Lecture examines how artists confront inherited violence, transform fracture into form, and re-map time and memory as acts of defiance. At this threshold—where creation’s inner reckoning converges with the collective call for justice—the Frederick Douglass Lecture dares us to imagine, as Douglass once did, how art might not only bear witness in dark times, but recompose the future from their shadow.

At the Edge of Entanglement—Ten North Group’s 2025 featured exhibition—explores how emerging and established African American artists navigate, resist, and reimagine the legacies of slavery, colonialism, and systemic oppression through decolonial aesthetics. Featuring painting, sculpture, installation, digital media, and performance, and positioned at the threshold where historical rupture meets radical invention, the exhibition draws on thinkers such as Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Sylvia Wynter, Fred Moten, and Tina Campt to frame Black artistic practice as both witness and architect of liberated futures. Refusing easy resolution, At the Edge of Entanglement invites viewers to dwell in dissonance, confronting the tensions of history and imagining what lies beyond its shadow.

About Lisa Farrington
Lisa Farrington is an award-winning art historian, Distinguished Professor Emerita at the City University of New York, and served as Associate Dean of Fine Arts and Director of the Gallery of Art at Howard University. Farrington won the Andy Warhol Foundation / Creative Capital Arts Writers Prize, the Spelman College / Atlanta University Endowed Chair in the Humanities, the Ford Foundation Education Fellowship, and three national awards for her Oxford University Press book on the history of African American women artists: Creating Their Own Image. She is winner of two Lifetime Achievement Awards from artist Faith Ringgold’s Anyone Can Fly Foundation and from Howard University’s Annual James A. Porter Colloquium on African American Art. Farrington has lectured on African American, European, Haitian, and women’s art at museums and universities worldwide and published dozens of scholarly essays, as well as ten solo-authored books. Among these is a revisionist history of African American art—her second book for Oxford University Press: African American Art: A Visual and Cultural History. Her most recent books are Black Artists in Their Own Words (University of California Press) and The World Before Racism: an Art Story (The Artist Book Foundation), both 2025

WHO: Presented by Ten North Group, as part of the 13th Annual Art of Transformation and the 2025 featured exhibition At the Edge of Entanglement.

WHAT: The Frederick Douglass Lecture extends the exhibition’s themes into a moral and aesthetic reflection—where art becomes an act of resistance, justice, and imagination. Inspired by Douglass’s legacy as an abolitionist and radical thinker, the lecture explores how artists transform inherited violence into form and fuse moral clarity with creative force in the pursuit of liberation.

WHEN: Saturday, December 6, 2025 | 10 – 11:30 AM (EST)

WHERE: The ARC, 675 Ali Baba Avenue, Opa-locka, FL, United States | Free and open to the public

Part of Miami Art Week and an official Art Basel Miami satellite exhibition, this lecture invites audiences to reflect on the intersection of art, history, and justice.

Learn more at: tennorthgroup.com/arts-culture

Special Guest Speaker Professor Lisa Farrington