EVENT DETAILS

'Bound to Appear' - Lecture by Professor Huey Copeland, Department of Art History, Northwestern University

Huey Copeland is a Professor of Art History at Northwestern University with affiliations in the Department of African American Studies and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. His work focuses on modern and contemporary art with emphases on the articulation of blackness in the Western visual field and the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality within global aesthetic practice.

Most notable among Copeland’s recent publications is Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America, a book funded by a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Program Grant and published by the University of Chicago Press. Focused on the work of Renée Green, Glenn Ligon, Lorna Simpson, and Fred Wilson, this project considers how slavery shaped American art in the last decades of the twentieth century in order to argue for a reorientation of modern and contemporary art history where the subject of race is concerned. The book, like much of Copeland’s work, derives from research into theories of subject formation, twentieth-century sculpture, histories of slavery, site-specific practices, and African American cultural discourse.

Sponsored by the Program in African American Studies, the Ph.D. Program in Visual Studies and the Department of Art History