Krista Thompson, "Black Light: Tom Lloyd, Refraction, and Art Historical Disregard"

Krista Thompson, Mary Jane Crowe Professor of Art History, Northwestern

"Black Light: Tom Lloyd, Refraction, and Art Historical Disregard"

Tom Lloyd was among a wave of artists working with light and electronic technologies in the 1960s. He was involved with the avant-garde Howard Wise Gallery in New York and was a founding member of the activist group the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC) (1969-1971). The AWC pressured museums to diversify their exhibitions, collections, and audiences. Black Light explores Lloyd’s early centrality in the mainstream art world in New York in the 1960s and seeks to understand why few archival and material traces remain of the work of an artist who waged precisely against the institutional disregard of Black and Puerto Rican artists. Lloyd was particularly interested in the concept of refraction, the process in which a light wave bends when it interacts with a medium. This paper considers refraction as a critical artistic, archival, and art historical practice.