Black Boy Fly: A Conversation with Joshua Renfroe and Bentley Brown

Join Joshua Renfroe, art director at Ralph Lauren, and curator Bentley Brown as they discuss the intersections between visual art and Hip Hop culture, especially in relation to photography and fashion. The conversation will be followed by a Q&A and book signing.

Joshua Renfroe is a NYC-based creative director, self-taught photographer, and author from Tuskegee, Alabama. His first self-published photography book, Black Boy Fly, was featured in Vice, Hypebeast, and nss magazine. Renfroe hosted two art shows in New York City, of which selected images were featured at Photo Schweiz, the largest photography event in Switzerland.

Multidisciplinary artist and scholar Bentley Brown is Adjunct Professor of Art History at Fordham University, teaches at Parsons School of Design/The New School, and is a PhD Fellow at NYU Institute of Fine Arts. He also co-curated Order / Reorder: Experiments with Collections at the HRM in 2022. His research at the Institute explores the pioneering role of Black artists and Black creative spaces within New York City’s contemporary art movements of the late 1960s through the mid 1980s. In his artistic practice, Brown uses canvas, found objects, photo-collage, and film to explore themes of Black identity, cosmology, and American interculturalism.

Photos: Joshua Renfroe by Hassan Boone (left); Bentley Brown by George Pejoves (right).

Support provided by Sarah Lawrence College through a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation.