The Black Index: Artists in Conversation ♥

The Black Index: Artists in Conversation

Friday, January 15, 2021, from 11 am – 12:30 pm

Join us for two conversations—artist Lava Thomas with professor Leigh Raiford, and artist Whitfield Lovell with curator LeRonn P. Brooks—about The Black Index, an online exhibition curated by Bridget R. Cooks at the Contemporary Art Center Gallery, the University of California, Irvine. These conversations explore the significance of the artists’ work featured in the exhibition along with the role of Black artistic practice within our current moment of political and social turmoil.

Bridget R. Cooks is an associate professor in the Department of African American Studies and the Department of Art History at the University of California, Irvine. She is author of Exhibiting Blackness: African Americans and the American Art Museum (University of Massachusetts Press, 2011).

Lava Thomas is an artist who tackles issues of race, gender, representation, and memorialization through a multidisciplinary practice that spans drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, and site-specific installations. Thomas is represented by Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco.

Leigh Raiford is an associate professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. 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 an artist internationally renowned for installations that incorporate masterful Conté crayon portraits of anonymous African Americans who lived between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Movement. Lovell is represented by D.C. Moore Gallery in New York City.

LeRonn P. Brooks is the associate curator for Modern and Contemporary Collections (specializing in African American collections) at Getty Research Institute. His interviews, essays, and poetry have appeared in publications such as BOMB Magazine, Callaloo, and the International Review of African American Art and on behalf of organizations such as the Studio Museum in Harlem, Socrates Sculpture Park, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, and Aperture Foundation, among others.

Organized by Bridget R. Cooks, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of African American Studies and Department of Art History (UCI) in partnership with Getty Research Institute’s African American Art History Initiative, this event is made possible in part through the generous support of the University of California Humanities Research Institute. Beginning January 14, experience the virtual exhibition The Black Index, and purchase the related catalog.

This event is in association with The Black Index: Archiving Black Creativity and Resistance

The conversation will be available on Getty Research Institute’s YouTube channel following the event.