UCLA Art Council Distinguished Scholar Lecture featuring Mark Godfrey

The Department of Art History proudly presents the UCLA Art Council Distinguished Scholar Lecture featuring Mark Godfrey, Director, New Curators, and guest curator of Kerry James Marshall: The Histories, Royal Academy of Arts, London.

In his talk, “Kerry James Marshall: The Histories” Godfrey discusses:

“The ‘histories’ in play in Marshall’s practice are multiple and intertwining. He thinks about the histories of painting’s conventions and genres. He considers the histories of materials that painters have used for centuries, like egg tempera, and those they have not, like glitter; the histories of perspective and flatness, of brushwork and gesture. While he is most known for confronting the exclusion of Black subjects in the history of figurative painting and in modernist abstraction, in several projects he has looked back at the history of the inclusion of Black figures, and at earlier attempts to forge a Black aesthetic, and at the histories of Afrofuturism. Marshall occasionally touches on personal history, more frequently attends to individuals who have been forgotten, and increasingly provokes questions about history that few others wish to confront. Marshall has worked on all these levels since 1980 because he recognises this is what it takes for ambitious work to be taken seriously and exhibited, because he regrets the way several Black artists before him have been romanticized precisely because of their disconnection from art history, and because he wagers that his layered approach to history will mean his work is taken seriously for centuries to come.”

The talk will occur on Monday, December 9, at 4 PM in the Laureate Room of the Luskin Conference Center.