The ICA is pleased to co-sponsor the annual Powell-Edwards public lecture, sponsored by the Powell-Edwards Fund for Religion and the Arts and the Center for the Study of Global Religions and Spiritualities. The event is a conversation between Dr. Marina Magloire (Emory University) and Dr. E. Gaynell Sherrod (VCUarts), two scholars, who have each published recent books on Katherine Dunham and Zora Neale Hurston that examine the legacy of Haitian Vodou in Black American Feminism and the arts. They will address how artistic, spiritual, and scholarly practices influence one another in the work of the scholar-artists they have studied, and in their own work. Their scholarship connects powerfully with the themes of art, spirituality, and research in the recent Ayida exhibit.

Marina Magloire is author of We Pursue our Magic: A Spiritual History of Black Feminism (UNC Press, 2023), and winner of the 2024 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize from the National Women’s Studies Association. E. Gaynell Sherrod is Professor of Dance + Choreography in VCUarts, and author of Katherine Dunham and the Dance Griots: Reading the Invisible Script (Mellen Press, 2022).

This event is co-sponsored by Center for the Study of Global Religions and Spiritualities; Powell-Edwards Fund for Religion and the Arts, and The Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU