The UCLA Department of Art History proudly presents the 2025 Patricia McCarron McGinn Lecture with featured speaker Tiffany Barber.
This event will take place on Monday, March 3, at 4pm in the Laureate Room of the Luskin Conference Center. A reception will follow and all are welcome.
This year, Professor Tiffany Barber will deliver a presentation entitled “Kara Walker, Contemporary Art, and the Black Female Bottom.” This talk analyzes the material and affective implications of Kara Walker’s recent turn to public sculpture and the connections she draws between the rawness of slavery’s memory in the US and the UK. Her two anti-monuments, A Subtlety (2014) and Fons Americanus (2019), depart from the drawings and cut-vinyl tableaux for which the artist is most known. Both artworks also connect two prominent locales within the Black Atlantic world’s development, marking a turning point in her practice. This lecture will focus on Walker’s unruly manipulations of the Black female form, namely the mammy and the Sable Venus, into a kind of power bottom that forces a distinction between Black women’s creative labors (as artists and caregivers) and art’s capacity to mitigate historical trauma.
The annual Patricia McCarron McGinn Lecture was inaugurated in 1992 to showcase the scholarship of a faculty member in the Department. It was established in honor of Patricia McCarron McGinn (1927 – 1991), who was an outstanding student in the UCLA Department of Art History. Her enthusiasm, depth of commitment, and dedication to the challenges of graduate study as a returning student enlivened and expanded the scholarly perspective of the program. To honor her memory, her family, with the generous support of many friends, established the Patricia McCarron McGinn Fund to aid students engaged in the study of art history at UCLA and to sponsor the McGinn Lectures.
For more information, please visit the event page here.
