Art & Boba Talk with Todd Gray | STUDENT-ONLY EVENT

Join us for a casual conversation over boba with Todd Gray. Working between Los Angeles and Ghana, Gray delves into the diasporic dislocations and cultural connections linking Western hegemony with West Africa. His interdisciplinary practice spans photography, performance, and sculpture, and his work is held in major museum collections worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and the J. Paul Getty Museum.
Through his unique process of layering images from his personal archive with African and European landscapes, Gray challenges traditional narratives and examines the enduring impacts of colonial power and racial identity. In his series Euclidean Gris Gris, Gray juxtaposes imagery of Enlightenment-era European gardens with rural African scenes, constellations, and galaxies, proposing a sculptural-photographic reconsideration of the harmful ideologies and environmental practices tied to Enlightenment philosophies. These works provoke critical conversations about the socio-environmental consequences of an epoch in which humans have had an outsized impact on the Earth’s climate. Gray’s piece from this series, Cosmic Blues (Makes Me Wanna Holler) (2019), is on view in Second Nature from February 26 through August 3, 2025.
This Art & Boba Talk with Todd Gray will be moderated by Enviornmental Justice lecturer, Dena Montague. Montague is the Founder and Executive Director of ÉnergieRich, an award winning international social enterprise partnering with students and faculty from several Universities in Ghana, including Tamale Technical University, Ashesi University and University of Development Studies, to establish local production of solar energy systems in Northern Ghana. Her research focuses on energy justice through decentralized production and impacts of Global North clean energy transition on climate/environmental justice in the Global South. Dr. Montague earned a PhD in Political Science from UCLA, and a BA in American Studies from Brown University.
All students are welcome to join for free boba and conversation! Art and Boba Talks are informal chats meant to be a welcoming space for students to engage with practicing arts professionals to learn more about working in the arts, what an art practice looks like, and/or to ask any questions you might have in your journey as an aspiring arts professional! We also welcome any folks who simply love art and want to join for a casual conversation over boba, no arts background required 🙂
This event is open to Stanford students only. Boba is limited to the first 20 RSVPs.