queer theory reading group

Event date:

Wednesday 30 October

Location:

L05 room in the ECA North-East Studio Building

Wednesday 30 October at 5:30 in the ante-room L06 in the North East Studio Building at ECA.

Our first session will take place on Wednesday, 30 October at 5:30pm in the L05 room in the ECA North-East Studio Building. If you can't find your way, get in touch with us (via email or call us at 07378709790).

We are going to pick up where we left off with our conversation before the summer (please don't worry if you've missed that event as we're keeping the same core reading).

What does queer black art making look like and how do we think about it?

In this session, we will discuss a black, queer theoretical context of art making with Derek Conrad Murray’s introduction to his book, Queering Post-Black Art (2015) along with examples of work by artists who are defined within queering the post-black ethos.

Murray defines post-black as the ‘specific conceptual, aesthetic, and political concerns of post-Civil Rights generation artists’ which seeks to reject the ideologies of blackness and redefine these visual and intellectual rhetorics (in a predominately African-American context) born out of the writings of WEB Dubois that peaked with the Black Panther Movement. To sum up these complex series of social constructs conceived amidst enslavement and systemic oppression, these ‘black ideologies’ exemplify the heteronormative black patriarch as the standard, while women and queers are ignored or all together invisible. Post-black art is a sort of/sometimes collective consciousness that satirizes and often contradicts signifiers of blackness making those signifiers mobile and open to multiple resignifications: what Murray calls ‘a queering of blackness’ (33). To queer post-black art, for Murray, is to refine those visual and intellectual rhetorics that have excluded black queer people by evolving and subverting the sexual and gender politics of not only blackness but the westernized world as black bodies exist and are oppressed in it.

In addition to the reading, we are listing below the examples of each artist’s work mentioned in Murray’s excerpt: Glenn Ligon, Mickalene Thomas, Kehinde Wiley, and Kalup Linzy. These are meant to be read as physical/visual/aesthetic representations of a post-black queerness.