Events

view times

Please join Gallery 400 and UIC’s Art History Department as we welcome Krista Thompson for a public lecture entitled “Refracting Art History: Tom Lloyd, Light Art, and the Effect of Race.” Thompson researches, teaches, and curates exhibitions at Northwestern University on the history of art and visual culture in the African diaspora, with an emphasis on photography. She is author of
An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Duke University Press, 2006). She has published in
African Arts, The Art Bulletin, American Art, The Drama Review, Representations, and
Small Axe. Her recent publications include, “A Sidelong Glance: The Practice of African Diaspora Art History,” published in
Art Journal (Fall 2011). Thompson teaches courses on photography in Africa and the African diaspora, critical race theory, visual cultures of colonialism and postcoloniality, art and commodification, and on modern and contemporary art and visual culture in the African diaspora and the Caribbean.

Thompson is currently working on several books. The first, Camera, Performance, and the Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice, is forthcoming from Duke University Press. The book examines the constitutive role of popular photography and video in the formation of contemporary Artican diasporic communities (concentrating on Jamaica, the Bahamas, and the United States) and their influence on contemporary art. The second book examines notions of photographic absence and disappearance in colonial and postcolonial Jamaica. An essay from this project, “The Evidence of Things Not photographed,” appeared in Representations in Winter 2011. Thompson is also writing a book on the use of artificial light in African American art, which focuses on Tom Lloyd, David Hammons, and Glenn Ligon. An essay on Ligon’s neon work is forthcoming in The Renaissance Society’s Black Is, Black Ain’t catalogue.