Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge
Free Book Launch and Conversation – Online & In Person
Speakers: Wendel A. White, Distinguished Professor of Art, Stockton University; 2021 Robert Gardner Fellow in Photography, Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, Harvard University
Cheryl Finley, Inaugural Director of the Atlanta University Center Art History + Curatorial Studies Collective; Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of Art & Visual Culture; Spelman College; Associate Professor, Department of Art & Visual Studies, Cornell University
Leigh Raiford, Professor of African American Studies, University of California, Berkeley
Deborah Willis, University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University
Conversation moderated by Brenda Tindal, Chief Campus Curator, Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences
Visual artist Wendel A. White photographs material culture, objects, documents, and books held in public collections to explore the complexities of American history, slavery, abolition, concepts of race, and Black life and culture. In this program, marking the launch of his book Wendel A. White: Manifest | Thirteen Colonies (Radius Books/Peabody Museum Press, 2024), White will engage in a conversation with contributors to the book. They will discuss White’s body of work, the construction of race within the archival imaginary, and the ways in which artifacts, material culture, art, and photography shape historical narratives, memories, and contemporary perspectives on Black life and culture.
Visit the Peabody Museum for free before and after the program to see Wendel White’s exhibition Manifest: Thirteen Colonies, and join us for the related ArtsThursdays event from 5:00 to 9:00 pm. Copies of Wendel A. White: Manifest | Thirteen Colonies will be available for sale.
Advance registration is recommended.
Free event parking at the 52 Oxford Street Garage starting at 4:30 pm.
Cosponsored by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology; the Harvard Museums of Science & Culture; the Office of the Chief Campus Curator, Harvard University; the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative; EDIBA Initiatives at the Office of the Librarian, Harvard University; and ArtsThursdays, a university-wide initiative supported by the Harvard University Committee on the Arts.
About the Speakers:
Wendel A. White (b. 1956, Newark, New Jersey) is currently Distinguished Professor of Art at Stockton University and has taught photography at the School of Visual Arts; The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art; the International Center of Photography; and the Rochester Institute of Technology. His work has received various awards and fellowships, including an honorary Doctor of Arts, Oakland University; Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography, Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, Harvard University; John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Photography; Bunn Lectureship in Photography, Bradley University; three artist fellowships from the New Jersey State Council for the Arts; Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts; and New Works Photography Fellowship from En Foco Inc. His work is represented in museum and corporate collections, including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, Illinois; among many others.
Cheryl Finley, PhD, is the Inaugural Director of the Atlanta University Center Art History + Curatorial Studies Collective; Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of Art & Visual Culture, Spelman College; and Associate Professor of Art History at Cornell University. Committed to engaging strategic partners to transform the arts and culture industry, she leads an innovative undergraduate program at the world’s largest historically Black college and university consortium in preparing the next generation of African American museum and visual arts leaders.
A curator and contemporary art critic, Dr. Finley is also an award-winning author noted for Committed to Memory: The Art of the Slave Ship Icon (Princeton University Press, 2018), the first in-depth study of the most famous image associated with the memory of slavery—a schematic engraving of a packed slave ship hold—and the art, architecture, poetry, and film it has inspired since its creation in Britain in 1788. Her co-authored publications of note include My Soul Has Grown Deep: Black Art from the American South (Yale University Press, 2018), Teenie Harris, Photographer: An American Story (Carnegie Museum of Art, 2011), and Diaspora, Memory, Place: David Hammons, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Pamela Z (Prestel, 2008). A frequent essayist, Dr. Finley’s writing has appeared in numerous academic and popular publications, including Artforum, Aperture, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, American Quarterly, and Small Axe.
Dr. Finley’s current book project, Black Art Futures, is a social art history of the global Black arts ecosystem, focusing on the relationships among artists, patrons, curators, museums, galleries, art and activism. Her current exhibition, ‘Free as they want to be’: Artists Committed to Memory is co-curated with Deborah Willis and on view at the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum from September 19 to December 10, 2024.
Leigh Raiford is Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches, researches, curates, and writes about race, gender, justice, and visuality. At Berkeley, Raiford is also co-director with Tianna S. Paschel of the Black Studies Collaboratory, a three-year initiative to amplify the world-building work of Black Studies funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Raiford is the author of Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle; coeditor with Heike Raphael-Hernandez of Migrating the Black Body: The African Diaspora and Visual Culture; and coauthor with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, and Laura Wexler of Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography. She is series editor of the Vision & Justice Book Series, an imprint of Aperture Press, with Drs. Sarah Lewis and Deborah Willis. Raiford is currently completing a book manuscript entitled When Home Is a Photograph: Blackness and Belonging in the World.
Deborah Willis, PhD, photographer, and scholar, is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts and Director of the Center for Black Visual Culture at New York University. She is the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, an Anonymous Was A Woman Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
She is the author of The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship and Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present, among others. Professor Willis’s curated exhibitions include: Framing Moments in the KIA, Migrations and Meanings in Art Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits at the International Center of Photography; Out [o] Fashion Photography; and Reframing Beauty: Intimate Moments at Indiana University.
Exhibitions of her artwork include: Rising Sun, African American Museum in Philadelphia; Monument Lab Staying Power, Philadelphia; 100Years/100Women, Park Avenue Armory, In Conversation: Visual Meditations on Black Masculinity, African American Museum Philadelphia and MFON: Black Women Photographers; In Pursuit of Beauty, Express Newark, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ; Mirror Mirror, Express Newark, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ; A Sense of Place, Frick, University of Pittsburgh; Regarding Beauty, University of Wisconsin; Interventions in Printmaking: Three Generations of African-American Women, Allentown Museum of Art; A Family Affair, University of South Florida; I Am Going to Eatonville, Zora Neale Hurston Museum; Afrique: See You, See Me; Progeny: Deborah Willis + Hank Willis Thomas, Columbia University, and Meditations at the Sugar Hill Museum in Harlem.
Brenda Tindal is the Chief Campus Curator for Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, leading the campus-wide visual culture renewal strategy to expand access to and engagement with Harvard’s vast memorial ecology and landscape of circulating artworks, public art, and material culture. She also previously served as the Executive Director of the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture. A seasoned museum leader, curator, community strategist, and public historian, Tindal’s practice is intentionally polyvocal and has centered on national and community narratives that grapple with complex historical legacies ranging from slavery, war and conflict, civil and human rights struggles, and contemporary social and cultural issues. She has curated, contributed to, and consulted on numerous exhibitions, public installations, performances, and museum projects, including COURAGE: The Carolina Story that Changed America (2005), “Your True Friend and Enemy”: Princeton & the Civil War (2012), K(NO)W Justice K(NO)W Peace (2017), Detroit 67’: Perspectives (2018), and the Slavery in Boston exhibit at Faneuil Hall (2023). Most notably, Tindal was part of the curatorial team that led the research, interpretation, and multi-media content strategy for the twelve permanent exhibitions and exterior memorial to African Ancestors at the International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina—which opened in 2023. Her curatorial work has been featured at Princeton University, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, Emory University, the Levine Museum of the New South, the Detroit Historical Society, and the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa, among other venues.