Stan Douglas: Ghostlight

Stan Douglas will be the subject of a major survey organized by the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College’s (CCS Bard) Hessel Museum of Art, Stan Douglas: Ghostlight.

Marking the first U.S. survey of his practice in over 20 years, the exhibition will include the North American premiere of Birth of a Nation (2025), an immersive, multi-channel video installation that revisits the 1915 D.W. Griffith film. The installation will be framed by a selection of nearly 40 works from the 1990s to the present that explore topics ranging from settler colonialism in the Americas, to the legacies of transatlantic slavery, to modern movements for liberation in Africa and Europe. Douglas’s deeply researched and longtime commitment to these histories provide an expansive view of the present, one that sheds light on moments of breakdown and chaos that attend societies in upheaval.

Lauren Cornell, Director of the Graduate Program and Chief Curator at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College notes, ”this survey seeks to show [Douglas’s] indelible influence on global contemporary art and also how his work offers one of the most lucid and vital ways to understand our present—a time when societies around the world are at an inflection point.”

Since the 1980s, Douglas has created films, photographs, and other multidisciplinary projects that investigate the parameters of their respective mediums. His ongoing inquiry into technology’s role in image making, and how those mediations infiltrate and shape collective memory, has resulted in works that are at once specific in their historical and cultural references and broadly accessible. Many works in the exhibition—rendered in film, video, photography, and installation—investigate pivotal historical events. Global in scope, Douglas’s projects also provide a longer timeline and broader context for the movements for justice in our present, such as Black Lives Matter, the Standing Rock protests, and decolonial struggles around the world.

Birth of a Nation (2025) is commissioned by the Hartwig Art Foundation with the Brick, Los Angeles.

Learn more at CCS Bard.