The cover of Legacy Russell's Black Meme: A History of the Images that Make Us, 2024. Photo courtesy Verso Books. Design by Nontsikelelo Mutiti.
Elizabeth Catlett, There is a Woman in Every Color, 1975. Color linoleum cut, screenprint, and woodcut on Arches paper, 22 1/4 in. x 29 15/16 in. (56.52 cm x76.04 cm). Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine, Museum Purchase, Lloyd O. and Marjorie Strong Coulter Fund.
Eadweard Muybridge, Horses. Gallop; thoroughbred bay mare (Annie G) with male rider, from “Animal locomotion. An electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases of animal movements”, 1872-1875.

Title card and promotional graphic for Legacy Russell’s BLACK MEME lecture for Atlanta Contemporary, 2020.

Video essay still rendered within the digital “frame” of a laptop graphic as from Legacy Russell’s 2020 video essay BLACK MEME.

Video essay still from Legacy Russell’s 2020 video essay BLACK MEME.

Cover of Legacy Russell’s first book Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto, designed by Elizabeth Karp-Evans of Pacific and published by Verso Books, 2020.

Screen still from Legacy Russell’s #GLITCHFEMINISM, video essay, 2018.

Black Meme: A History of the Images that Make Us

Legacy Russell is a writer and curator whose ongoing academic work and research focuses on gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new media ritual.

Artist Bio

In Black Meme, Legacy Russell, award winning author of the groundbreaking Glitch Feminism, explores the “meme” as mapped to Black visual culture from 1900 to the present, mining both archival and contemporary media. Russell argues that without the contributions of Black people, digital culture would not exist in its current form. Through imagery, memory, and technology, Black Meme shows us how images of Blackness have always been central to our understanding of the modern world.

Black Meme was published by Verso Books on May 7, 2024. Order the book here. 

Discipline
Digital Media, Literary Nonfiction
Award Year
2021
Status

Completed

Themes

2021 Artist Retreat Presentation

Events

Legacy Russell in conversation with J Wortham

July 8, 2024 6:30PM

McNally Jackson Seaport
4 Fulton St., New York, NY 10038
A black webpage.

Legacy Russell: BLACK MEME

March 23, 2023 6:30PM ET

NYU Art History
Silver Center for Arts and Science
Room: 301

Black queer femme with hair tied back at the nape of her neck wearing a yellow and white floral dress with black trim looks sideways at the camera with chin tilted up.

Legacy Russell

Brooklyn, NY

Legacy Russell is a writer and curator whose ongoing academic work and research focuses on gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new media ritual. Her first book, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020, Verso Books), is a cyberfeminist call to action that positions error as an opportunity for revolution, exploring the relationship between gender, technology, and identity. She is the Associate Curator of Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem, the recipient of the Thoma Foundation 2019 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, and a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency Fellow.

Photo: Daniel Dorsa.

Events