Black Arts Consortium logo

Northwestern’s Sawyer Seminar will begin with the local: Chicago. This symposium will explore the deep histories, social and political artistic movements, and players by engaging the rich archive of black arts in Chicago from the nineteenth century to the present, hosting pioneers from an earlier generation as well as those artists who have taken up the mantle and carried it forward.

The corresponding graduate course, “Black Arts Chicago,” will be taught by Professor of Art History Rebecca Zorach, who has published a book about the history of the Wall of Respect mural on Chicago’s South Side and on the history of art in Chicago during the Black Arts Movement, and Assistant Professor of Communication Studies Aymar Christian, whose OpenTV online network collaborates with Chicago-based queer artists to produce television programs. The course will take students on three field trips to various spaces in the city of Chicago, including to the South Side to the Wall of Respect and surrounding areas in Bronzeville; the DuSable Museum of African American Art; and Theaster Gates’s Stony Island Arts Bank.

This second landing in the Sawyer Seminar will engage the various histories of cohabitation between African-American and Caribbean communities, and the tensions that animate this rich archive that includes Anglophone, Spanish, and French-speaking black and brown artists, constituting yet another component of translation.

The corresponding graduate course will be “Blackness Across Borders: Circum-Caribbean Art Practices” co-taught by E. Patrick Johnson and Ramón H. Rivera-Servera, who have previously taught a related course called “Blacktino Queer Performance” both as an undergraduate special topics course and a graduate course. “Blacktino Queer Performance” stages a conversation among blackness, Latinidad and sexuality by examining the work of black and brown artists in the black diaspora. Using “blacktino” as the framing device, the course highlights how these artists index the specificities of black and brown social and political relations, while also waging a broader queer-of-color critique of institutionalized racism and homophobia. For the purposes of the Sawyer Seminar, the course would be modified to include artists in the Anglophone and French-speaking Caribbean to include, for example, Bahamas, Dominican Republic, and Haiti; the focus expanded beyond sexuality as a key node, and art forms would include literature, film, visual art, and music. Chicago-based Caribbean artists will visit the course to share and discuss their art archives and the class will take a field trip to Chicago to experience live performances relevant to the topic.

The third stop in the Sawyer Seminar will examine how modes of anti-blackness and resistance to them continue to differentially inform the aims and ambitions of black artistic practices in the U.S. and South Africa, sites marked by shared yet divergent histories of slavery, segregation, white supremacy, and settler-colonialism. Thinking across geographical locations will not only enable a comparative method for understanding the structural limitations and possibilities informing black artistic practice globally, but also highlight extant historical links between Chicago and Cape Town that might otherwise be lost to the archive. Of particular focus will be the pan-Africanist ties forged between the cities from Bandung to FESTAC as well as how such connections continue to be shaped in the present. The seminar will thus engage practitioners from both locations.
The corresponding graduate course, “Contemporary Art and Public Culture in Post-Apartheid South Africa” will be co-taught by Huey Copeland and Krista Thompson as a revised version of a course they have previously taught in Cape Town as a part of the Myers Graduate Travel Seminar in the Department of Art History. This course will focus on how colonialism and white supremacy, and resistance to them, continue to shape Cape Town as a cultural complex more than 20 years after the official end of apartheid in South Africa. The seminar will include visits from Chicago-based scholars and artists with experience and expertise in South African arts. The students will explore visual culture’s complex role in the challenging process of democratic transition.

While theories of transnationalism have tended to the dispersal of cultural and aesthetic content across national boundaries, and while studies of Afrodiasporic art have tracked African retentions in contemporary expressive practices across the diaspora, less attention has been paid to the role of translation in simultaneously occurring art practices across the black diaspora. This Institute brings together three working groups of arts researchers focused on African, Caribbean, and African-American art to imagine black art as a transnationally networked form and to discuss the translational tactics deployed by artists to sustain Afrodiasporic connection across geographic, linguistic, cultural, and aesthetic borders.

Pursuing the convergences and divergences that constitute black art in internationally circulating configurations and seeking to understand how this common ethic is constituted in gestural, sonic, visual, and linguistic acts of translation, the summer institute will invite presenters to share research specifically engaged with these questions. At least one of the scholars who has participated in each of the preceding Sawyer Seminars will be invited back to be a part of the culminating summer institute. Moreover, students who have participated in the corresponding courses over the year, as well as students from our collaborating institutions, would also have an opportunity to share their work.