For the first Lens of Impact event of 2025, we are joined by Dr. Jonathan Michael Square, Assistant Professor of Black Visual Culture at Parsons School of Design, and Sasha Huber, a Swiss-Haitian visual artist-researcher based in Helsinki, for a conversation exploring the intersections of self-fashioning, visual culture, and historical accountability. Through art and research, they examine how fashion and artistic interventions challenge dominant histories, reshape narratives, and offer new perspectives on identity, resistance, and memory.
For over a decade, Sasha Huber has engaged in reparative artistic interventions, notably through her involvement in Demounting Louis Agassiz, a campaign initiated in 2007 by Swiss historian and activist Hans Fässler, which critically reassesses the Swiss-born scientist’s legacy, including his role in promoting ‘scientific’ racism.
Dr. Jonathan Square’s work focuses on fashion and visual culture of the African Diaspora, notably also the history of enslavement through a fashion lens. He recently curated the exhibition Revolisyon Toupatou at the New School, which shines a light on the role of fashion and textile arts in narrating Haitian history and identity.
Together, Square and Huber will discuss the mutual Haitian connections in their work, reflecting on how historical narratives are woven into identity and artistic expression. Their exchange will illuminate the ways in which art and research can challenge dominant histories and offer new perspectives on the enduring legacies of colonialism, resistance and accountability.
Lens of Impact is a joint initiative between Parsons’ School of Art and Design History and Theory (ADHT) at The New School and Swissnex in Boston and New York, exploring the cross-cultural spaces of art and design discourse.
Agenda
- 12:00pm – Doors open
- 12:15pm – Welcome remarks
- 12:25pm – Discussion and Q&A
- 1:30pm – Networking
- 2:00pm – End
iCal / Outlook
Event start time
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New York
12:00PM
Bios
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Bio
Jonathan Square
Parsons School of DesignDr. Jonathan Michael Square is the Assistant Professor of Black Visual Culture at Parsons School of Design. He earned a PhD from New York University, an M.A. from the University of Texas at Austin, and a B.A. from Cornell University. Previously, he taught in the Committee on Degree in History and Literature at Harvard University and was a fellow in the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Most recently, he curated the exhibition Past Is Present: Black Artists Respond to the Complicated Histories of Slavery at the Herron School of Art and Design, which closed in January 2023. He is currently preparing for his upcoming show titled Afric-American Picture Gallery at the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library. A proponent of the use of social media as a form of radical pedagogy, Dr. Square also leads the digital humanities project Fashioning the Self in Slavery and Freedom.
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Bio
Sasha Huber
ArtistSasha Huber is a Helsinki-based internationally recognized visual artist-researcher of Swiss-Haitian heritage. Huber’s work is concerned with the politics of memory, care and belonging in relation to colonial residues left in the environment. Connecting history and the present, she uses and responds to archival material within a layered creative practice that encompasses performance-based reparative interventions, video, photography, and collaborations. Huber also usurps the staple gun, aware of its symbolic significance as a weapon, while offering the potential to renegotiate unequal power dynamics and the possibility of repair, symbolically stitching colonial wounds together. She holds an MA in visual culture from Aalto University in Helsinki and is presently undertaking a practice-based PhD in artistic research at the Zurich University of the Arts. Huber also works in a creative partnership with visual artist Petri Saarikko. From 2021–24 her work has been touring under the title “You Name It” which was circulated by The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto.
