WPI Webinar Series – Race Matters: Cultural Politics in the 1960s
Thursday, September 14, 2023 at 1:00 pm ET – Virtual on Zoom
And the next three Thursdays. Use this link to register for the series wpi art
Brought to you by the Wildenstein Plattner Institute (WPI) publishes of the Romare Bearden Digital Catalogue Raisonné.
The 1960s was a tumultuous moment in American history as racial equality movements propelled sweeping changes to the body politic. This critical juncture in the nation’s race relations captured the public’s attention as the media delivered the unfolding drama to their doorsteps. The turbulent racial climate spurred the artist Romare Bearden’s pivotal turn to collage and return to Black figuration.
This webinar series presents new insights into the work of Bearden and his contemporaries. His fellow artists, who came from diverse racial backgrounds, joined Bearden in responding to the tenor of the times and tackling Black subject matter and/or racial themes in their work. The series will expand our understanding of how racial concerns were articulated during this watershed decade.
Thursday, September 14, 2023 at 1:00 pm ET
Romare Bearden, the South, and the Southern Black Arts Movement
— with James Smethurst
This talk will discuss the place of the South, what Romare Bearden described as the “homeland of my imagination” in Bearden’s work. It will also consider the impact of Bearden and his work on the Black Arts Movement in the South during the 1960s and 1970s.
James Smethurst is a Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930-1946; The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s; The African American Roots of Modernism; Brick City Vanguard: Amiri Baraka, Black Music, Black Modernity; and Behold the Land: A History of the Black Arts Movement in the South. His current book project studies the interchange between the Black Arts Movement in Britain and in the United States.
For more information and to register for all four series: Use this link: wpi art