Apostles of Beauty, Apostles of Truth: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Artistic Credo

Apostles of Beauty, Apostles of Truth: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Artistic Credo

Please join artist Angel Abreu; W.E.B. Du Bois Center Assistant Director Adam Holmes; and Pratt Professor Juan Jofre Lora for a panel discussion focused on W.E.B. Du Bois’s influence on contemporary art. This event is being presented in conjunction with Pratt Manhattan Gallery’s current exhibition, “In Our Time: Eleven Artists + W.E.B. Du Bois,” on view now through December 20, 2025.

Thursday, October 23, 2025

6:30pm

Pratt Manhattan Campus

Room 201

144 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Panelist Bios:

Born in the Bronx, NY, in 1974, Angel Abreu is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice blends painting, literature, and education to reimagine how visual art can be a catalyst for personal and social transformation. Abreu is best known for his long-standing collaboration with the historic art collective Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (Kids of Survival). His creative process thrives in collaborative settings, particularly with youth, where the intersection of visual art, storytelling, and pedagogy serves as fertile ground for deep exploration.

As a member of K.O.S., Abreu’s art resides in over 120 public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. His collaborative projects have also been showcased in renowned spaces such as the Walker Art Center, the Tate Modern, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts. Through his exhibitions, workshops, and community-centered projects, Abreu continues to build a legacy that intertwines art, education, and social change.

Adam Holmes is responsible for running the W. E. B. Du Bois Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he has worked since 2018. The UMass Amherst library, also named for Du Bois, is the home of the W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, a vast collection of correspondence, photographs, manuscripts and other materials from Du Bois’s long life. The Center exists as a space for the activation of this collection and for the interpretation of Du Bois’s work and thought more broadly. Through lectures, concerts, panels, reading groups and more the Center maintains an active calendar of weekly events both in-person and online. It also supports groundbreaking scholarship through its summer fellowship program.

Holmes’s academic background encompasses History and American Studies, and he spent several years working for the National Literacy Trust in the United Kingdom, running programs aimed at improving the lives of citizens in the country’s most underserved communities. His own research on Du Bois focuses on Du Bois’s lifelong efforts to resist and correct distortions of American history, particularly those related to slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.

Moderator Bio:

Juan Jofre is currently an Assistant Professor in the Foundation Department at Pratt Institute. He is a practicing architect and educator in New York City, a cofounder of JLA Soundsystems, and runs a small interdisciplinary design practice, Estudio Esmero.

Prior to joining Pratt, he was the Emerging Fellow in Design at the School of Architecture at UT Austin, where he taught design studios, workshops, and seminars for both graduate and undergraduate programs.

Juan has worked for several renowned firms, including A+I, Tod Williams & Billie Tsien, and Weiss/Manfredi, and participated in multiple public exhibitions, including as the Research Coordinator for OfficeUS, the American Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Biennale.

He pursued his graduate degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he was the recipient of the Imre Halasz Thesis Prize for his work on architecture in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Prior to graduate school, he attended the University of Cincinnati as a Darwin T. Turner Fellow and graduated Magna Cum Laude with a Bachelors in Science of Architecture. In 2011, he was named a Soros Fellow for New Americans.

Born in Bogota, Colombia, he immigrated to the United States in 1996.