The 32nd Annual Norma U. Lifton Lecture in Art History
Scholars Adrienne Brown and Rashad Shabazz will present new work on and join in conversation about Black Studies approaches to the aesthetics, value, and spatial politics of Black life.
Register Here! Zoom link and password will be sent to all registrants prior to the event.
Adrienne Brown is associate professor of English at the University of Chicago. Her teaching and research focus on American and African American cultural production in the twentieth century, with a special focus on issues related to critical race studies, visual culture, and architecture and urban studies. Brown’s book The Black Skyscraper: Architecture and the Perception of Race examines the impact of the skyscraper on the perception and social construction of race in literature and American culture more generally. Brown is also the co-editor with Valerie Smith of the interdisciplinary collection Race and Real Estate. Currently, she is working on a second book focusing on the residential and racial politics of mass home ownership in the twentieth century.
Rashad Shabazz is an associate professor in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. His academic expertise brings together human geography, Black cultural studies, gender studies, and critical prison studies. His research explores how race, sexuality, and gender are informed by geography. His most recent work, Spatializing Blackness, examines how carceral power within the geographies of Black Chicagoans shaped urban planning, housing policy, policing practices, gang formation, high incarceration rates, masculinity, and health.
Sampada Aranke is an assistant professor in the Art History, Theory, Criticism department at the SAIC. Her research interests include performance theories of embodiment, visual culture, and Black cultural and aesthetic theory. Her work has been published in e-flux, Artforum, Art Journal, ASAP/J, and Trans-Scripts: An Interdisciplinary Online Journal in the Humanities and Social Sciences at UC Irvine. She has written catalogue essays for Sadie Barnette, Rashid Johnson, Kambui Olujimi, Sable Elyse Smith, and Zachary Fabri. She's currently working on her book manuscript entitled Death's Futurity: The Visual Life Black Power.
The Norma U. Lifton Endowed Lectureship has sponsored a quarter century of talks at SAIC by eminent art historians, including Eleanor Heartney, Linda Nochlin, Whitney Chadwick, Griselda Pollock, Johanna Drucker, Kristine Stiles, Tsongzung Chang, Gerardo Mosquera, Ann Gibson, Jerry Saltz, Anne Higonnet, Roberta Smith, and Hollis Clayson. The fund, administered by SAIC’s Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, was established in memory of Norma U. Lifton, former visiting lecturer in the department.
Image Caption: Kara Walker, 40 Acres and a Mule, 2015, charcoal on three sheets of paper, Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired through the generosity of Candace King Weir, Agnes Gund, and Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine Farley
Persons with disabilities requesting accommodations should visit saic.edu/access.
