Notes from Charging Elk sketchbook, September 24, 1940.  Archives of the Musée Maillol de Banyuls-sur-Mer

Friday, March 3, 2023 - 3:30pm

Jill and John Avery Lecture in the History of Art, Philip J. Deloria, Harvard University

"Notes from the Charging Elk Sketchbook, 1940: A Discourse on Art and Epistemology"

Class of 1978 Orrery Pavilion, 6th Floor, Kislak Center, Van Pelt Libraries

In which a conversation is staged between cultural critic Walter Benjamin and Charging Elk, a refugee Lakota modernist so thoroughly unknown he might as well be a figment of collective imagination.  Their newly revealed exchanges, which circled through art, museums, modernism, the sacred, and life and death itself, participate in a project of epistemological commensurability and distinction that seeks to engage concepts of decolonization, Indigenization, and survivance