Artist, activist, and community organizer Tom Lloyd was an early pioneer of using electric light as an artistic medium. Collaborating with an engineer at the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), Lloyd developed a highly experimental and technologically advanced art practice in the 1960s that challenged popular understandings of the work and role of Black artists. His pioneering artwork was the focus of the Studio Museum’s first exhibition, Electronic Refractions II, in 1968. Based on extensive new scholarship and intensive conservation work, Tom Lloyd will explore twenty years of the artist’s career, including his pivotal contributions to the intersection of art and technology, and pay tribute to his activism with the Art Workers’ Coalition and his founding of the Store Front Museum, the first art museum in Queens.
