Join artist Lava Thomas in conversation with Leigh Raiford, Professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley, and artist Whitfield Lovell in conversation with LeRonn P. Brooks, Associate Curator for Modern and Contemporary Collections at the Getty Research Institute to launch The Black Index exhibition at the Contemporary Art Center Gallery, UC Irvine.
These conversations will explore the significance of the artists’ work featured in the exhibition and discuss the role of Black artistic practice within our current moment of political and social turmoil.
Schedule
11:00AM — Welcome and introduction: Bridget R. Cooks, exhibition curator of The Black Index and Associate Professor in the Department of African American Studies and the Department of Art History, University of California, Irvine
11:10AM — In Conversation: Artist, Lava Thomas and scholar, Leigh Raiford
11:45AM — In Conversation: Artist, Whitfield Lovell and curator, LeRonn P. Brooks
12:20PM — Closing Remarks: Bridget R. Cooks
Participants
Lava Thomas tackles issues of race, gender, representation and memorialization through a multidisciplinary practice that spans drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, and site-specific installations. Thomas’s practice centers ideas that amplify visibility, healing, and empowerment in the face of erasure, trauma and oppression. Thomas is represented by Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco.
Leigh Raiford is Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, where she teaches and researches about race, gender, justice and visuality. She also serves as affiliate faculty in the Program in American Studies, and the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies. Raiford is the author of Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
Whitfield Lovell is internationally renowned for his installations that incorporate masterful Conte crayon portraits of anonymous African Americans from between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Movement. Using vintage photography as his source, Lovell often pairs his subjects with found objects, evoking personal memories, ancestral connections, and the collective American past. Lovell is represented by D.C. Moore Gallery in NY.
LeRonn P. Brooks is the Associate Curator for Modern and Contemporary Collections (specializing in African American collections) at the Getty Research Institute. His interviews, essays, and poetry have appeared in publications for Bomb Magazine, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Socrates Sculpture Park, The Spelman Museum of Art, Callaloo Journal, The International Review of African American Art as well as The Aperture Foundation, among others.
Presented by the Getty Research Institute, this conversation complements the exhibition The Black Index curated by Bridget R. Cooks, Associate Professor in the Department of African American Studies and the Department of Art History at the University of California, Irvine.