BlackGrounds: Black Melancholia as a Critical Practice

The second lecture in this series features writer and curator Nana Adusei-Poku.

This talk will propose Black Melancholia as a critical art-historical and curatorial practice that engages with methodological as well as ethical questions when we encounter gaps in the archive and are confronted with the non-linear aspects of anti-blackness in Black artists’ lives.

About the speaker:

Nana Adusei-Poku, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in African Diasporic Art History in the Department of History of Art at UC Berkeley, California. She was previously Associate Professor and Luma Foundation Fellow at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York. She is the author of Taking Stakes in the Unknown: Tracing Post-Black Art (2021), editor of Reshaping the Field: Art of the African Diaspora on Display (2022) and, her articles have been published in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, e-flux, Kunstforum International, Flash Art, L’Internationale and darkmatter. She curated the event ‘Performances of Nothingness’ (Academy of Arts, Berlin, 2018) and Black Melancholia (Hessel Museum Bard College, New York 2022).

BlackGrounds is a new lecture series co-presented by VCUarts’s department of Art History and the ICA at VCU. which is hosted in collaboration with VCUarts’s department of Art History and ICA VCU. The series will feature innovative art historical scholarship on the many ways in which artists from Africa and its diasporas explore the dialogue between the global and the local. BlackGrounds seeks to offer critical and historical context to regionally and nationally grounded discourses of Black identity and belonging, as well as globally imagined geographies of Black diasporic and Pan-African community