In her lecture Mabel O. Wilson will examine how prolific artist Carrie Mae Weems creates mise en scène explorations of history, place, and meaning. Weems meticulously constructs counter histories that expose how photography became a tool in the arsenal of racialization. Across her works Weems asks if it is possible to disengage the racial double bind that melds the ahistoricity of blackness that located Black people outside of modernity to the primacy of blackness that kept it fundamental to modernity’s historical unfolding and modernism’s fertile imagination.
Mabel O. Wilson, Columbia University
Nancy and George Rupp Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation
Professor in African American and African Diasporic Studies
Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies
George Levitine Lecture in Art History
The George Levitine Lecture in Art History is in conjunction with the Middle Atlantic Symposium in the History of Art. This lecture is hosted by the University of Maryland.