Black Box Lunch

Several times throughout the year, Blue Star Contemporary Art Center presents Black Box Lunch. These short and intimate lunchtime chats give featured artists direct contact with their audience and art-lovers the chance to peek inside the artist's mind. Delicious box lunches from SIP are available for $8 to members, $10 to non-members. Past Black Box Lunch artists include Philip John Evett, Justin Parr and Ed Saavedra, Ivano Vitali and Joan Hall, and Julia Barbosa Landois.

Justin Randolph Thompson is a Florence, Italy based sculptor and new media artist born in Peekskill, NY in '79. He has lived between Italy and the US, since 2001 and has exhibited internationally and participated in numerous residencies in the US and in Europe. His work explores the historic implications of triumph, victory and ascension by re-contextualizing references from Roman antiquity and mending these with aspects of African-American culture both past and present. Exploring cultural displacement or imposed hierarchies and adorning status symbols with hybrid connotations through a talismanic application of culturally specific materials his work encompasses sculptural installation, performance, video and sound. Reflecting upon the socially constructed communal legacy, he examines expectations and shortcomings through the absence of a concrete linear foundation.