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Phillip B. Williams, Anthony Joseph, and Mark Villegas

Shamel Pitts and Jafari S. Allen in Conversation

BAC Speaker/Performer Series: Antawan Byrd

Black Arts in the City: The Factotum

Bicentennial Black: Diana Ross, Black History, and the Spirit of 1976

Scott Poulson-Bryant

Assistant Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies

University of Michigan

Friday, November 11, 2022

12:00 PM – 1:00 PM

University Hall, 201

Scott Poulson-Bryant is a cultural historian and critic. His main areas of specialization are African American popular culture and Performance Studies, with teaching and research focuses on Hollywood film, black popular music, 20th and 21st century U.S. drama, genre fiction, gender and sexuality studies, and creative nonfiction writing. One of the founding editors of VIBE magazine, Poulson-Bryant has published journalism, profiles, reviews, and essays in such publications as Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, SPIN, the New York Times, Essence, Ebony, and The Source. His books include HUNG: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men in America (Doubleday) and The VIPs: A Novel (Broadway/Random House). His academic work has appeared in American Studies, The Journal of Popular Music Studies, Palimpsest, and Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, and he is currently finishing his monograph Everybody is a Star: Race, Glamour, and Citizenship in 1970s US Popular Culture. 

BAC Artist-in-Residence: Kelvin Haizel

Friday, October 28, 2022

12:00 PM – 1:00 PM

University Hall, 201

Kelvin Haizel’s artistic practice began with an ontological question – what is the object of an image? – Over the years he has developed experiments in manufacturing images via the expanded field of the photographical. His extended body of work seems to ask what images can do. It is a materialist attitude towards the production of images that sides with the multiplicity and plasticity of the image in its phenomenological manifestations. His work has been shown in OderlyDisorderly (2017), Rencontres de Bamako, Biennale Africaine de la Photographie (2017), Stellenbosch Trienniale (2020), ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum (2021), Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago (2022), Hamburg Photography Triennial via MARKK Museum (2022). He participated in Documenta fifteen as a member of the blaxTARLINES collective. Haizel was a resident artist at Hyde Park Art Centre summer of 2022 and is currently a research scholar at Northwestern University through the Black Arts Consortium.

The Day I Met the Sun: Turiyasangitananda Listening Session with Devin T. Mays

Sunday, December 5, 2021   

2:30 p.m. to 3:15 p.m.

Hyde Park Art Center  

Resident artist Devin T. Mays will present a listening session as ritual inspired by the music and artistic practice of Turiyasangitananda, the Sanskrit name of jazz musician Alice Coltrane. Conceived as both an offering and meditation, Mays will share reflections on each musical selection, which we will experience collectively. This program is in partnership with Black Arts Consortium, Northwestern.

BAC x Hyde Park Art Center Residencies

BAC and the Hyde Park Art Center launched an artist residency in early 2021. In support of Chicago-based artists, the BAC x Art Center Residencies welcomed our inaugural cohort, Jory Drew, Dorothy Burge and Devin Mays. 

Black Art in Anti-Black Worlds: Africa and the Black Diaspora

Saturday, May 1, 2021   

12 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.

Via Zoom  

Speakers include: Bimbola Akinbola, Mphutlane wa Bofelo, Ndumiso Dladla, Nomusa Makhubu, and Mshaï Mwangola. The Symposium is followed by a roundtable discussion and Q&A is moderated by Athi Joja. Sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Sawyer Seminar Grant and the Northwestern Black Arts Consortium.

Click the link to register for this event.

Scream my name like a protest: R&B Music as BlackFem Technology of Humanity in the Age of #blacklivesmatter

Alexander Weheliye
Professor of African American Studies
Northwestern University
January 31, 2020 | 12 p.m.

In this talk, Northwestern professor, Alexander Weheliye, discusses the recent prominence of #blacklivesmatter and the broader movement for Black lives that has put pressure on Black art and music to become more politicized in order to address the continued disregard of Black life by state and non-state institutions in the US and many other parts of the world.

Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before: Subversive Portrayals in Speculative Film and TV

Diana Mafe
Associate Professor of English
Denison University
January 27, 2020 | 5 p.m.

In this talk, Denison English professor, Diana Adesola Mafe, discusses her recent book Where No Black Woman Has Gone Before, which examines radical representations of black womanhood and girlhood in new millennial British and American speculative film and television. Her original case studies range from 28 Days Later to Firefly but she will also address more recent examples, including Star Trek: Discovery and Black Panther.

Mama Knelt at the Altar of Aretha: Record Collecting, Hip Hop, and Black Feminist Listening Praxis

Jennifer Stoever
Associate Professor of English
State University of New York at Binghamton
November 11, 2019 | 5 p.m.

In this talk, Binghamton University English professor, Jennifer Lynn Stoever, discusses her current research project “Living Room Revolutionaries,” which documents the record collecting and selecting practices of Black and Latinx women in the 1960s and 1970s, and explores how playing records at home shaped—and passed on—a black feminist listening praxis that helped bring hip hop into being.

A Site of Struggle: Making Meaning of Anti-Black Violence in American Art

Janet Dees
Steven and Lisa Munster Tananbaum Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art
The Block Museum of Art
October 4, 2019 | 12 p.m.

In this talk, Block Museum Curator, Janet Dees, discusses her upcoming exhibition project, ‘AS Site of Struggle’, which seeks to put contemporary conversations about racial violence and representation in art into a longer historical context. The exhibition will open at the Block Museum in January 2021.

Sweet Tea Turns Ten

Celebrating the tenth anniversary of E. Patrick Johnson’s groundbreaking book, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South – an
oral history.

View the event flyer

NORTHWESTERN TO CONVENE INTERNATIONAL SCHOLARS ON ARCHIVING BLACK ARTS

Northwestern University has been awarded a $225,000 Sawyer Seminar grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to fund a series of seminars entitled “The Black Arts Archive: The Challenge of Translation.”