Detail of Emory Douglas’s back cover for The Black Panther, April 3, 1971. Bobby Hutton. © Emory Douglas/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
October 2, 2023
Prof. Huey Copeland’s conversation is featured on the cover of the October issue of Artforum.
Let's Ride: Art history after Black studies
by Huey Copeland, Sampada Aranke, Faye R. Gleisser
October 2023 | Artforum
BLACK STUDIES—as modeled by the transdisciplinary work of contemporary thinkers such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Saidiya Hartman, Kara Keeling, Katherine McKittrick, Christina Sharpe, Fred Moten, and Frank B. Wilderson III—has grown increasingly central to critical thought in the art world and the academy, with especially urgent implications for art-historical praxis: How do the discipline’s notions of objecthood and objectivity shift in light of transatlantic slavery’s production of persons as property? How must art-historical methods, given their origins in racist, sexist, and colonialist epistemologies, be retooled to engage with complexities of Black life and expression that are designed to evade capture? What becomes of art history as an intellectual enterprise when the ethical imperatives and liberatory horizons of Black studies occasion an interrogation of both the discipline’s objects of analysis and its political imaginaries? This year marks the publication of two groundbreaking books that address these questions.
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