A Black Gaze: Tina Campt in Conversation with LeRonn Brooks (June 3, 2021)
What is a “Black gaze”? The idea of a “gaze” is commonly invoked as a shorthand for visual structures of dominance (the white gaze, colonial gaze, etc.)—but what does it mean to combine the gaze with Blackness? In conversation with Getty associate curator LeRonn Brooks, Tina Campt will unpack these questions as she sees them emerging in the work of Black contemporary artists.
Tina M. Campt is the Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities and Modern Culture and Media at Brown University and a research associate at the Visual Cultures in Art and Design Research Centre at the University of Johannesburg. She is the author of four books, most recently A Black Gaze, published this year by MIT Press.
LeRonn 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.
This lecture is part of the Beyond the Borders, Beyond the Boundaries series, which brings together speakers whose work expands art historical scholarship beyond the intellectual and geographic constraints that have traditionally defined it. Presented by the Getty Research Institute’s Director’s Office, the series’ topics range from depictions of race in 18th-century painting to participatory art about undocumented migration, provoking new ways of thinking about how practices of inclusion and exclusion have shaped the field.
Visit our Exhibitions and Events page for more information and to register for these free programs. The conversation will be recorded and available on Getty Research Institute’s YouTube channel following the event.
Dancers on Film: Two by Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich (June 10, 2021)
The second program for our Director’s Film Series, Dancers on Film, presents filmmaker and artist Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich in conversation with research specialist Kristin Juarez. The discussion will center on how experimental filmmaking reimagines the fragments of African American narratives found in archival material and cinema histories. The program will include a screening of the artist’s short films, including her surrealist documentary Spit on the Broom (2019), which explores the history of the United Order of Tents—a clandestine organization of Black women organized in the 1840s during the height of the Underground Railroad. The program will be accompanied by a pre-screening of George Stevens’ film Swing Time (1936), the classic Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musical that speaks to Hunt-Ehrlich’s use of dance to create new understandings of the cinematic genre. Swing Time will be available for viewing from June 9 through June 11 through webinar registration.
Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich is a filmmaker and artist whose work has screened internationally. She appeared on Filmmaker Magazine’s 2020 list of “25 New Faces of Independent Cinema.” Her first feature film, Madame Négritude (forthcoming), received screenwriting support from the San Francisco Film Society’s Rainin Grant, and was a 2020 finalist at Biennale College Cinema, the Venice Film Festival’s prestigious film lab and fund.
Kristin Juarez is the research specialist for the African American Art History Initiative at the Getty Research Institute. She studies the work of modern and contemporary multidisciplinary artists who utilize the moving image, dance, and visual art. She is co-curator of the forthcoming exhibition Blondell Cummings: Dance as Moving Pictures, which will open at Art + Practice in September 2021.
This program is the second in an ongoing series that considers how the moving image archives dance and what dance can archive. This program is associated with the Getty Research Institute’s African American Art History Initiative.
The conversation will be recorded and available on Getty Research Institute’s YouTube channel.
