Presented by Kelly Writers House
Join scholar, theorist, art historian, and author Rizvana Bradley for a panel discussion and book signing in celebration of Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and The Critique of Form (Stanford University Press, 2023), shortlisted for the 2024 MLA Prize for a First Book and named one of the Top Books of 2023 by FRIEZE. Moving across multiple histories and geographies, artistic mediums and forms—from nineteenth-century painting and early cinema, to the contemporary text-based works, video installations, and digital art of Glenn Ligon, Mickalene Thomas, and Sondra Perry—Bradley inaugurates a new method for interpretation that begins from the proposition that blackness cannot be represented in modernity's aesthetic regime, but is nevertheless foundational to every representation.
The evening will start with a reading from Anteaesthetics by Professor Bradley, followed by a panel discussion with artist and critic Aria Dean, University of Pittsburgh History of Art & Architecture Professor Huey Copeland, artist Cameron Rowland, and Stephen M. Gorn Family Assistant Professor of English and poet Simone White. Copies of the book will also be available for purchase. The event is co-hosted by the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer and Transgender Studies, the Institute of Contemporary Art, and the Kelly Writers House, with additional support from the Women’s Center, Department of English, Department of Cinema and Media Studies, Department of Comparative Literature, and Department of Art History and Fine Arts.
Rizvana Bradley is Associate Professor of Film and Media and Affiliated Faculty in the History of Art and the Center for Race and Gender at the University of California, Berkeley. Bradley’s book, Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form (Stanford University Press 2023), was named a Best Book of the Year by Frieze Magazine and shortlisted for the Modern Language Association (MLA) Prize for a First Book. Bradley serves on the Advisory Board of the academic journals October and Camera Obscura. Her scholarly articles appear in Diacritics, Film Quarterly, Black Camera, Discourse, The Drama Review, and her art criticism appears in The Yale Review, Artforum, e-flux, Art in America, November, and Parkett. Bradley's work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, Creative Capital, and the Andy Warhol Foundation. She was the 2023-24 Terra Foundation Visiting Professor for American Art at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin.
Huey Copeland is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Art and Black Study at the University of Pittsburgh, interrogates African/Diasporic, American and European artistic praxis from the late 18th-century to the present with an emphasis on articulations of blackness in the Western visual field. In his interdisciplinary research, Copeland focuses on the intersections of race and gender, subject and object, the aesthetic and its others from a black feminist perspective that reveals the biases and elisions of the discipline. Rather than assume the redemptive power of art, he aims to push history against the grain in exploring the constitutive relationship between the capture of black life and the production of cultural property in the modern transatlantic world. An editor of October and a former contributing editor of Artforum, Copeland has published in numerous periodicals as well as in international exhibition catalogues and essay collections. His research interests are further reflected by his course offerings, which range from an introductory survey focused on Euro-American modernisms and their global entanglements to the graduate seminar “Visual Study after Intersectionality.” In addition, Copeland has served as primary advisor for dissertations on topics ranging from early 21st-century Chinese art’s literal and figurative haunting by socialist realist aesthetics to the intersection of the racial and the ecological in 19th-century Francophone Caribbean visual culture. Alongside his work as a teacher, critic, editor, scholar, and administrator, Copeland has co-curated exhibitions such as Interstellar Low Ways (with Anthony Elms), and co-organized international conferences like “Afro-Pessimist Aesthetics” (with Sampada Aranke).
Aria Dean (b. 1993, Los Angeles, CA) is an artist, writer, and filmmaker based in New York City. She has exhibited widely in the U.S. and internationally; recent exhibitions include Facts Worth Knowing at Chateau Shatto (Los Angeles), Aria Dean: Abattoir at ICA London (2024), Figuer Sucia at Greene Naftali, New York (2023), Abattoir, U.S.A! At the Renaissance Society, Chicago (2023); Quiet as It’s Kept: Whitney Biennial 2022 at The Whitney Museum, New York (2022). Bad Infinity, her first book of collected writing, is out via Sternberg Press.
Cameron Rowland lives and works in New York. Their work is grounded in the black antagonism of property. Rowland’s work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at the Dia Art Foundation, Beacon; Museum MMK für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Galerie Buchholz, Cologne, Germany; Établissement d'en face, Brussels; Artists Space, New York and Essex Street / Maxwell Graham, New York.
Simone White is Stephen M. Gorn Family Assistant Professor of English and Associate Director of the Kelly Writers House. White is a scholar of 20th- and 21st-century Black studies and radical Black poetics, as well as a critically-acclaimed poet. She received the prestigious Whiting Award in 2017 and recently received a 2021 Creative Capital Award. She has published three books: Dear Angel of Death, a collection of poems and critical essays; Of Being Dispersed (poems), and House Envy of All the World (poems), as well as two poetry chapbooks. Another poetry collection, Or, On Being the Other Woman will be published by Duke University Press in 2021. In addition, White has published numerous critical essays and poems in popular periodicals such as Artforum, Boston Review and Harper's Magazine. Prior to receiving her doctorate in English from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, White earned a J.D. from Harvard Law School and an M.F.A. from The New School.
Che Gossett is associate director of the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer and Trans Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to returning to Penn — where they received an M.A. in History — they were the Racial Justice Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia Law School from 2021-23, and a Animal Law and Policy fellow at Harvard Law School from 2022-2024. Gossett has published work in anthologies such as Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (MIT Press, 2018), and is co-editor, with Yale University African American Studies professor Tavia Nyong’o, of a forthcoming Social Text journal special issue on Sylvia Wynter, culture, and technics. They are the recipient of a 2024 Creative Capital Andy Warhol Writers Grant for their forthcoming book on Marlon Riggs, queer cinema and the Black radical tradition.
Rachell Morillo is ICA’s DAJ Director of Public Engagement and Research. In this role, she is responsible for spearheading the development of innovative, community-led programs and projects that foster critical dialogue, promote quality of life, and cultivate civic engagement in Philadelphia. Morillo brings a wealth of experience in arts education and community engagement, having previously served as Associate Educator of Civic Engagement at the Museum of Modern Art and Senior Coordinator of Public Programs & Community Engagement at The Studio Museum in Harlem.
