The Contemporary: On Simone Brown & Hank Willis Thomas
Speaker(s): Luke Williams (PhD Candidate in Modern, Thought & Literature, Stanford)
The first Contemporary meeting of the Fall Quarter will take place November 10, 2021 at 1:00 pm in Pigott Hall, Bldg. 260, Rm 216.
Luke Williams (PhD Candidate, MTL) will lead the conversation about Simone Brown's Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness and the work of artist Hank Willis Thomas.
RECOMMENDED READING / VIEWING:
Simone Brown, "Branding Blackness," from Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, pp. 89-129 *Duke UP, 2015
Hank Willis Thomas, "Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America 1968-2008," X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal, 2008
Luke Williams is a scholar, artist, organizer, and critic of twentieth and twenty-first century Black performance and visual cultures. His work, which spans embodiment, portraiture, Afrofuturism, commodification, and the aesthetics of the Black radical imagination, focuses on Black Diasporic art in the Americas and broader Atlantic world. Luke is a PhD candidate in Modern Thought & Literature at Stanford University. He most recently held fellowships for the Committee of Black Performing Arts at Stanford and the Jefferson Scholarship at the University of Virginia.
[Biography updated Nov 5, 2021]
Image credit: Hank Willis Thomas