Book Talk: Tamara Lanier’s Fight With Harvard to #FreeRenty
Wednesday, February 12, at 8pm (EST) / 5pm (PST)
At this online event co-presented by Hyperallergic and ICA LA, activist Tamara Lanier and Hyperallergic’s Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian will discuss From These Roots (Crown, 2025), her new book about her struggle with Harvard University over its ownership and control of images of her great-great-great grandfather Renty Taylor and his daughter Delia, who were photographed for a professor’s racist research.
Hyperallergic has reported on the fight to #FreeRenty for the past several years, notably in a 2022 episode of the Hyperallergic Podcast, in which Vartanian interviews Lanier, as well as in a 2021 special edition examining her ongoing legal case against Harvard.
Lanier’s memoir From These Roots comes out of this quest to retrieve her ancestors’ daguerreotypes. More than a personal story, it is a call to confront the enduring afterlife of slavery and the unfinished business of reparative justice in the United States. Raising important questions about the work of reparation, and the decolonization of museums and archives, Lanier asks: Who owns these images given the total absence of consent in their production? What does the work of undoing slavery’s legacies actually look like?
Renty and Delia’s names are heralded on banners made by the artist Cauleen Smith, on view in the entrance of ICA LA as a part of the exhibition Scientia Sexualis.
Tamara Lanier and Hrag Vartanian will be joined by Jennifer Doyle, queer theorist, art critic, and Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside; and Jeanne Vaccaro, scholar, curator, and co-founder of the NYC Trans Oral History Project.
Join the conversation on February 12 at 8pm (EST) / 5pm (PST) via Zoom.
This virtual event is produced in a partnership between ICA LA and Hyperallergic.