About the Event
The Department of Art History cordially invites everyone to attend the last Katherine Tsanoff Brown Lecture of the semester featuring Dr. Tina Campt, Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. Dr. Campt is a black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art.
Signed copies of a selection of Dr. Campt’s books, including A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See (MIT Press, 2023), will be available for purchase by local bookseller Kindred Stories at the event prior to the start of the lecture and at the conclusion of the event.
“Carrie Mae Weems and the Afterlives of Images: A Visual Correspondence” Friday, April 5 | 4:00PM Kraft Hall, Room 110
About the lecture
This talk explores the unique forms of visual correspondence found in the work of one of the preeminent contemporary artists of her generation: Carrie Mae Weems. It explores her engagement with the Black body as a bridge of contact and commemoration between artist and audience, individual and collective, and the living and departed. Examining a selection of her recent works, the talk asks us to consider how Black artists activate images as a conduit of connection that force us to grapple with converging temporalities of Black subjection and Black possibility.
Tina Campt is Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor of Humanities at Princeton University, where she holds a joint appointment between the Department of Art and Archeology and the Lewis Center for the Arts. Campt is a black feminist theorist of visual culture and contemporary art and lead convener of the Practicing Refusal Collective and the Sojourner Project. She began her career as a historian of modern Germany, earning a PhD in history from Cornell University. She is one of the founding scholars of Black European Studies, and her early work theorized gender, racial, and diasporic formation in black communities in Europe and southern Africa, with an emphasis on the role of vernacular photography in historical interpretation. Campt’s more recent scholarship bridges the divide between vernacular image-making in black diasporic communities and the interventions of black contemporary artists in reshaping how we see ourselves and our societies. Her teaching reflects her ongoing interest in exploring the multiple sensory registers of images and the importance of attending to their sonic and haptic registers. Campt has published five books including: A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See (MIT Press, 2021); Listening to Images (Duke University Press, 2017); Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe (Duke University Press, 2012); and Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (University of Michigan Press, 2004). Her co-edited collection, Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography (with Marianne Hirsch, Gil Hochberg and Brian Wallis, Steidl, 2020), received the 2020 Photography Catalogue of the Year Award from Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation.
For more information, email arthist@rice.edu.
