Northwestern Events Calendar

Oct
21
2015

Afrotropes: A User's Guide to Black Visual Culture -Huey Copeland & Krista Thompson (Art History, Northwestern)

When: Wednesday, October 21, 2015
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM CT

Where: 620 Library Place, Conference Room, 620 Library Place , Evanston, IL 60208 map it

Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Public - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students

Contact: Program of African Studies   (847) 491-7323

Group: Program of African Studies

Category: Lectures & Meetings

Description:

Abstract

In this two-part lecture, art historians Huey Copeland and Krista Thompson will present case studies that articulate the theoretical stakes and material persistence of what they have termed "afrotropes," those forms that have emerged within and become central to the construction of black culture and identity in the modern world. By homing in, respectively, on the visual lives of the American "I AM A MAN" sign (1968) and a photograph produced for the Jamaican film The Harder They Come (1972), Copeland and Thompson explore how African diasporic visual motifs take on flesh over time and reckon with what remains unknown or cast out of the visual field.

Bios

Huey Copeland (Ph.D., History of Art, University of California, Berkeley, 2006) is Associate Professor of Art History with affiliations in the Department of African American Studies and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. His writing—which has been translated into French, German, and Spanish—focuses on modern and contemporary art with emphases on the articulation of blackness in the Western visual field and the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality within global aesthetic practice. A regular contributor to Artforum, Copeland has also published in Art Journal, Callaloo, Camera Obscura, Nka, Parkett, Qui Parle, Representations, and Small Axe as well as in numerous international exhibition catalogues and edited volumes, such as the award-winning Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art, edited by Cornelia Butler and Alexandra Schwartz.

Krista Thompson (Ph.D., 2002, Emory University) is the Weinberg College Board of Visitors Professor and Professor in the Department of Art History. She researches and teaches the modern and contemporary art and visual culture of the Africa diaspora, with an emphasis on photography. She is author of An Eye for the Tropics (2006), Developing Blackness: Studio Photographs of “Over the Hill” Nassau in the Independence Era (2008), Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (2015), and co-editor of En Mas’: Carnival and Performance Art of the Caribbean (forthcoming, 2015). Her articles have appeared in American Art, Art Bulletin, Art Journal, Representations, The Drama Review, and Small Axe. She has received grants and fellowships from the Andy Warhol Foundation, the J. Paul Getty Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and was awarded the David C. Driskell Prize from the High Museum of Art in 2009.

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