Kirsten Pai Buick “In Authenticity: ‘Kara Walker’ and the Eidetics of Racism”
Art History Colloquium
September 10, 2021
4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Location
Email eortega@uic.edu for Zoom Link
Address
Chicago, IL 60612
Cost
Free
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Kara Walker has been a force in the art world since the mid‐1990s while the subject of her work has varied little since then. Through costuming and suggestive titling, she invokes nineteenth-century slavery as well as the controlling images of African Americans that abound from that era. This talk will explore three interwoven aspects of Walker’s work—irony, authenticity, and the guise of history—that reveal how Walker’s work functions to commodify racism and thus reproduce ‘race’ as the originary idea(l).
Kirsten Pai Buick, is a professor of art history at the University of New Mexico. She received her Ph.D. in art history from the University of Michigan and was a SAAM Predoctoral Fellow and a Charles Gaius Bolin Fellow at Williams College. Buick is a recipient of the David C. Driskell Prize for African American Art and has published extensively on African American art, including her book Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject (Duke Univ. Press, 2010). Her second book, In Authenticity: “Kara Walker” and the Eidetics of Racism, is in progress.
Date posted
Sep 6, 2021
Date updated
Sep 6, 2021