Black Meme

Legacy Russell was born and raised in New York City. She is the Executive Director & Chief Curator of 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. She is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation 2019 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency Fellow, a recipient of the 2021 Creative Capital Award, a 2022 Pompeii Commitment Digital Fellow and a 2023 Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellow. Russell's written work, interviews, and essays have been published internationally. Her first book was Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020).

• List of IllustrationsOverture: Black Planets / Black Memes / Black Acts1. Strange Fruit, Gone Viral: The Souls of Moving Image2. Eating the Other: Emmett Till's Memory, Myth, and Black Magic3. Selma On My Mind: Protest, Media, and Viral Witness4. Sporting the Black Complaint: John Carlos and Tommie Smith, Silent Blackness, and Memetic Nationhood5. Viral Zombiism: Michael Jackson and "Thriller"6. Paris is Burning: Viral Ballrooms and Memetic Royalties7. Reality, Televised: On the Rodney King Generation8. Refusing Symbolism: Anita Hill and Magic Johnson9. "The Dancing Baby": Birth of a [Gif] Nation10. The Shadow, The Substance: Renty and Delia as Viral Daguerreotypes11. Meme Afterlives: Lavish Reynolds In Broadcast (And, Anyway, Arrest the Cops That Killed Breonna Taylor)Outro in Remix: Lyric for the Black MemeAcknowledgmentsNotes

Black Meme makes clear we are an image based world and the foundational force shaping our understanding of this is Blackness. That acknowledgement naturally then brings forward questions of agency and authorship. Russell expertly explores and guides readers through the many quandaries therein allowing us to arrive on the other side, eyes wide and taking in the many, many sights (screens) almost as if for the first time tasked with better queries for our AI-powered-hyper-visible world but still with familiar demand: Reparations now! Free the Black meme!