Knight Foundation Art + Research Center spring 2021: “Animating Archives”

Virtual seminars
Jafari Sinclaire Allen: May 3–5, The Black Gay 80s
Eddie Chambers: May 10–12, Re-reading Black British Artists’ Practices
Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman: May 24–26

The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA Miami) continues the fifth annual program for its flagship application-based research and education initiative, the Knight Foundation Art + Research Center (A+RC). As part of the continuing collaboration with the University of Miami Africana Studies/Center for Global Black Studies departments, the A+RC spring 2021 virtual semester, “Animating Archives,” considers archives as active elements—both internally changing in relation to new readings and outwardly generating new ways of thinking and being in the world. 

Inspired by Lyle Ashton Harris’s Ektachrome Archive currently on display at ICA Miami, A+RC spring 2021 presents a series of seminars that explore the impact historical archives, particularly those that have developed around radical theoretical and artistic production, may have on our current moment. These seminars are developed within the framework of A+RC’s ongoing “Black Hemisphere” research rubric from fall 2019.

Application
Applications are available now at icamiami.org. The deadline to apply is Monday, April 19. Admission is free for those accepted into the program. ICA members, college students, and national and international artists and cultural producers are encouraged to apply; however, space is limited.

Visiting Faculty
Dr. Jafari Sinclaire Allen is the Director of Africana Studies, and Center for Global Black Studies; and Associate Professor of Anthropology, at the University of Miami. His scholarship and teaching have opened new lines of inquiry and offered re‐invigorated methods of narrative theorizing in anthropology, Black diaspora studies, and feminist and queer studies. His new book, There’s a Disco Ball Between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life, will appear on Duke University Press this Fall. A recipient of fellowships and awards from the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Columbia and Yale universities, and others; Allen is the author of ¡Venceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-Making in Cuba; editor of Black/Queer/Diaspora; the new introduction to Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men, and a number of other publications. Allen is currently at work on two monographs: Marooned in Miami: Ecologies of Black Life on an Edge; and Structural Adjustments: Black Survival in the 1980s.

Dr. Eddie Chambers earned his PhD from Goldsmiths College, University of London in 1998, for his study of press and other responses to the work of a new generation of Black artists in Britain, active during the 1980s. Following periods of teaching at Emory University, Atlanta, he joined the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin in January 2010 where he is now a Professor, teaching classes and seminars relating to art history of the African Diaspora. He has guest-edited several issues of journals, namely Critical Interventions, NKA Journal of Contemporary African Art (two issues), and the International Review of African American Art.

Dr. Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman is the Associate Professor of American Studies and English at Brown University specializing in African American literature and culture, gender and sexuality studies, and visual culture and media studies. Her research explores topics ranging from the interrelatedness of sexuality and social order in slave narratives to the impacts of Civil Rights retrenchment on black social organization and cultural output in the current moment. A two-time winner of the Darwin Turner Award for Best Essay of the Year in African American Review, Dr. Abdur-Rahman’s scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as African American Review, American Literary History, GLQ, The Faulkner Journal, The Black Scholar, The James Baldwin Review as well as a number of edited collections, including Faulkner and Whiteness, The Cambridge Companion to James Baldwin, and The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative. A committed and engaged scholar-activist, Dr. Abdur-Rahman publishes reflective social and political commentary in such online journals as The Feminist Wire and the A-Line: A Journal of Progressive Thought.